In Need of a (Play) Doctor

Little Doc, the first play by documentary filmmaker Dan Klores, wants to raise a lot of questions about friendship and a certain way of living in 1975 Brooklyn. But the only pertinent question you’ll ask yourself after its 90 minutes have dragged to a close is why people insist on glamorizing the ’70s.

Granted, I wasn’t there. Maybe I just don’t know what I’m missing. But if the drug users in Little Doc were having the same conversation in Williamsburg in 2010, I’d find them just as shrill and annoying. A junior varsity Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Klores’ play finds best friends and drug dealers Ric (Adam Driver) and Lenny (Bill Tangradi) trapped in a small apartment with Ric’s girlfriend Peggy (Joanne Tucker, who frequently forgets that her character has a Brooklyn accent) and their incoherent gay friend Billy (Tobias Segal). But Peggy is also Lenny’s wife, and their recently released convict friend Angelo (Salvatore Inzerillo) is standing guard to prevent anyone from leaving, under orders from wheeler-dealer Manny (Dave Tawil), who employs Ric and Lenny in his shady doings.

That’s it. That’s the whole plot.

Of course, other playwrights have made do with less. Albee made a single boozy night with college faculty members into a blistering drama, after all. But Klores is no Albee—he isn’t even Mamet, though with Little Doc he tries awfully hard to be—and his characters are insufferable to the point of apathy. Angelo’s going to beat up the innocent Lenny over Ric’s skimming off the top? Yawn. Peggy got into the Stella Adler Studio and Ric hid her acceptance letter for a few months? Anyone have an emery board?

There is David Rockwell’s stellar set to help while away the minutes that feel like hours, at least. Splitting the Rattlestick’s stage in half, Rockwell has created a period-perfect ’70s apartment (complete with Frigidaire and a clearly inherited side table) and a gleaming Brooklyn bar that looks so good one wishes it was actually serving alcohol during the incessant yelling that director John Gould Rubin has encouraged from his actors.

Driver was seen to better effect last summer at the Rattlestick, in the mesmerizing and powerful Slipping. Not that he gives a bad performance here, it’s just that Rubin and Klores have given us no doorway into empathizing with Ric, or anyone else for that matter. He complains about his childhood and the ill-advised medical treatment that his father forced upon him, but there’s always a wall of artifice separating Klores’ characters from the audience. We see and hear them (God, do we hear them), but we’re never fully engaged in their quarrels. And since everyone seems to secretly hate one another anyway, there are plenty of quarrels.

Steven Marcus and Tawil, as Ric’s father and his father figure, respectively, are welcome, calm adult presences in a sea of angsty twentysomethings (though Tawil has been costumed by Clint Ramos to look closer to a leather daddy than a menacing crime lord). Everyone else is simply present, given little to do but argue and scream. A dispiriting way to begin Rattlestick’s new season, Little Doc is in serious need of medical attention.

>> Little Doc Through July 18, The Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, 224 Waverly Pl. (betw. Perry & W. 11th Sts.), 212-868-4444; $45.