Bogus Boogey Men

Those of us who eagerly follow Adam Rapp’s career as a playwright are often a cranky bunch; his plays feel like a case of one-step forward, two-steps back. Last spring’s The Metal Children, the most fully realized and adult of Rapp’s plays thus far, seemed to indicate a corner turned. But now Rapp has returned to his 15-year-old Ghosts in the Cottonwoods, and Rapp is right back to his dumb white trash families living in squalor.

But unlike, say, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Ghosts in the Cottonwoods is almost aggressively, arbitrarily ugly. Over the course of 90 minutes, we get the usual condescending attitude towards Rapp’s hill people (the program swears the play is set in “the uncharted forested region between the interstate and the factory outlet in the southern Midwest,” but the characters seem to be out of a particularly perverse early Dolly Parton song), plus a rape, three naked men, a miscarried fetus and an improvised click language.

If you haven’t already been put off, let me add that the cast, all company members of The Amoralists Theatre Company, commit to the extremes of Rapp’s script with an almost defiant conviction. As they speed through their talkin’ scenes (Rapp directs with an almost maniacal need for speed), they seem less and less like real people and increasingly like a playwright’s constructs.

As mother Bean Scully (Sarah Lemp) and her youngest son Pointer (Nick Lawson) are waiting for her oldest son Jeff (James Kautz) to come home after six years, someone is killed, Pointer’s girlfriend Shirley Judyhouse (Mandy Nicole Moore) appears soaking wet and clutching a suitcase and the po’ white people talk reaches epic proportions. And though Jeff’s eventual appearance coaxes the story into action, his frantic, silent, feeding frenzy upon his arrival feels more like a lost Chris Kattan performance as Mr. Peepers than anything believable. Also along for the ride are William Apps as a wounded stranger who means the Scullys harm, and Matthew Pilieci as Jeff’s silent, dangerous friend.

By the time the show has ended, Rapp and his cast have put you through the wringer, for very little reason other than that they could. And the capper to all of this is the curtain call, in which the cast pose stone cold dead serious on the stage. The effect, no doubt, is intended to be chilling. But the combination of the Gothic story and their unblinking gazes instead makes the moment seem like the family shot that ended episodes of The Addams Family.

Ghosts in the Cottonwoods

Through Dec. 6, Theater 80, 80 St. Marks Pl. (betw. 1st & 2nd Aves), 212-388-0388; $40.