My overall impression
GO: THE INTERVIEW Playwright-director Michael Franco’s disturbing drama opens with a prisoner (Michael Dunn) being tortured during a ruthless interrogation by a pair of suit-wearing men who appear to be government agents. At first the interrogation unfolds to a traditional good cop/bad cop formula, with one agent (Dylan Maddalena, interestingly sinister) authorizing the prisoner’s being thumped with phone books and dunked in a water bucket and the other (Joe Hulser) desiring to take a more reasonable approach to ferreting out the information the prisoner supposedly knows. Before long, though, the story takes an unexpected turn into areas of complex moral ambiguity and metaphysics. Franco’s taut staging is eerily suspenseful, as we start to question the reality of the setting and scenario, and the production is abetted by Tim Labor’s buzzy, thump- and zap-filled electronic sound design, which effectively gets under our skin. Open Fist Theatre, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; June 16 & 22, 6:30 p.m.; June 20 & 28, 8 p.m.; June 22 & 30, 3:30 p.m. hollywoodfringe.org/projects/1281. (Paul Birchall)
