STAGE REVIEW : ‘Down the Road’ in La Jolla Is Bumpy Ride Toward Dead End

LA JOLLA — What makes serial killers tick? Why are their numbers growing? What kind of a society is it that spawns them?

Playwright Lee Blessing has set himself the impossible task of answering these questions. But his new play, “Down the Road,” which opened Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse under the direction of Des McAnuff, is as stumped as the sociologists.

Blessing, who wrote two other plays staged by McAnuff at La Jolla (“A Walk in the Woods,” about the private talks of an American and a Soviet arms negotiator, and “Two Rooms,” about the effects on his family of the taking of a political hostage), has made a mini-science of the small-cast, big-issue play.

The approach worked best in “Walk.” By the time Blessing had written “Eleemosynary,” another one-set, witty 90-minute piece about three generations of iconoclastic women, the signature style was showing signs of wear. The play’s Manhattan Theatre Club staging (seen at the Spoleto Festival in May) owed most of its success to three talented performers. In “Down the Road,” a three-way exploration of serial killing, Blessing’s formula has reached a dead end. He raises the hard questions and, when he can’t answer them, aborts the play.

Writers Iris and Dan Henniman (Susan Berman and Jonathan Hogan) have landed a terrific assignment. They’re going to do the book on the life of serial killer Bill Reach (James Morrison). Reach, in some forsaken federal prison, is eager to cooperate. Dollar signs fairly dance off the project. Think paperbacks, think film and television.

Iris and Dan jauntily take up residence in a motel room 10 miles from the penitentiary. Ambiance is set up: The view from the window is a rusting water heater on someone’s front porch. The best restaurant around is McDonald’s. And it’s only going to get tougher, they fairly cluck, as it goes along.

Ah, the joys of the fray.

Iris is the experienced interviewer, Dan the novice. For that reason, she tells Dan, he must interview Reach first--set him up while she goes in for the kill.

If this hints at sexual politics, Blessing soon drops the ball. Dan’s first interview proves Iris right. His technique is lousy: He talks too much, asks too many leading questions, apologizes a lot. No wonder Reach quickly gains the upper hand. This is a guy who knows how to apply a stranglehold.

In the end, he also strangles the play. Blessing made a serious tactical error when he decided to allow Reach to talk only about his crimes, never his motivations. He’s darn proud to have killed 19 women, maybe more. But every time he’s asked one of those $64 questions about why he killed (as opposed to how), Reach clams up.

No talkee, no play.

So we’re faced with a double negative: the interview overused as a means of disseminating fundamentally dull if needed exposition--and a protagonist who won’t speak when it comes to examining what the play’s about.

Unable to focus on the large issues, Blessing belabors the small ones: Iris and Dan’s marital chatter, their separate fantasies, the rusting water heater, a forced outrage at this murderer’s evil (what did they expect?), topped by an ending not organically connected to the play.

Iris, who has become pregnant in the course of the investigation, suddenly decides she doesn’t want to go on with a project that has become distasteful. (Why is not made especially clear, though a thin thread of reason is established between her impending motherhood and Reach’s killing of a 10-year-old girl.)

More inexplicably, the marriage threatens to fall apart when Dan suggests that he has the right to go on with the project alone. There is lots of indignation and even a curious tape-burning scene that can only charitably be described as borrowed from “Hedda Gabler.”

McAnuff moves everybody around nicely. Composer Michael Roth (with designer John Kilgore) has provided an appropriately chilling sound score, and Neil Patel an efficient double-duty set--part motel room, part maximum security prison. Lights (Peter Maradudin) and costumes (Sudan Hiferty) complete the garnish.

The three-member cast is able, though the play makes no heavy-duty demands on anyone. At the Warren Theatre on the UCSD campus. Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m.; matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m., through Sept. 17. “Pay What You Can” matinee this Saturday. Tickets: $18-$25; (619) 534-3960.