Manbites Dog Theater’s play about Disney imaginative, agitating

Lucas Hnath’s “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney” (not an actual reading but a play about a reading) gets an appropriately agitating and frustrating staging (Hnath’s stated goals for his plays) in Manbites Dog Theater Company and Streetsigns’s co-production.

In this non-historical, highly imaginative play, Walt Disney has his brother Roy, his daughter Diane and her husband Ron participate in reading a screenplay Walt has written about his legacy of perfect-world films and theme parks, along with what he hopes will be his own cryogenic preservation (he’s secretly dying of lung cancer). As he acts out scenes with the others, he emerges as chillingly egotistical and manipulative, obsessed with controlling everything and everyone.

Hnath avoids easily digested scenes and emotionally affecting resolutions so viewers won’t fall into passive, automatic responses. He also wants the dialogue’s sounds and rhythms to be a major part of the experience.

To that end, Hnath employs two devices. Walt reads out all the screenplay instructions, such as “fade in” and “exterior,” and makes use of “cut to” in dizzying repetition. In addition, much of the dialogue consists of half-finished sentences interrupted by other half-finished sentences that build excruciating tension. Director Joseph Megel keeps the momentum taut as his cast impressively executes these verbal maneuvers.

Derrick Ivey’s Walt is another in his recent string of stellar turns, expertly projecting the character’s power-hungry, adoration-seeking mania. David Berberian does what he can with one-dimensional Ron, eager to be brought into the company.

Megel adds his own twists by casting a woman as Roy and an African-American as Diane. Elisabeth Lewis Corley’s exasperated Roy, resigned to taking the fall for Walt’s missteps, and Lakeisha Coffey’s restrained Diane, angered by Walt’s demand to name a child for him, attest to both actors’ talents. Gender- and color-blind casting is practically the norm now, but its use here doesn’t seem to add much to the script’s intentions.

Joseph Amodei’s projections of Disney’s blueprints and hospital charts enhance Sonya Leigh Drum’s boardroom setting but causes additional shadows in Andrew Parks’ uneven lighting.

The 80-minute production fascinates in many ways, but whether the “agitating” aspects are stimulating or maddening will be up to each audience member.

This story was originally published September 19, 2016 at 7:58 PM with the headline "Manbites Dog Theater’s play about Disney imaginative, agitating."