One wishes playwright Lisa Loomer had taken a less literal approach with ‘Distracted,’ her newest play now running at the Mark Taper Forum. The serious, sometimes humorous piece, about parents struggling with their 9-year-old son’s Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) diagnosis, suffers from a movie-of-the-week tenor, with the audience left yearning for dramatic arcs and epiphanies that never quite come. Before the play starts, theatergoers get a big thematic nudge by the stage’s noisy backdrop. Three giant video screens dominate an otherwise minimal set, where TV clips and Internet screens, changing at breakneck speed, underscore a world gone crazy with too much information. The spectacle isn’t especially jarring, but maybe that’s the point, how impervious we’ve become to our own fractured, multitasking lives. Rita Wilson stars as Mama, a sort of upper-middle-class ‘everywoman,’ both earnest and vulnerable, who relentlessly searches to find a ‘cure’ for Jesse, her overly energetic and easily distracted wild child. In the opening scene, Mama, seated in a lotus position tells us ‘I have to meditate–fast!’ Thus begins her own distracted journey. Along the way, she seeks advice from a variety of therapists and doctors (all played to comic effect by Bronson Pinchot) on how best to tame her volatile son. The solutions range from eliminating wheat and dairy from his diet to taking Ritalin. When Mama makes the agonizing decision to give Jesse medication, her husband threatens to divorce her. ‘Dad,’ played by Ray Porter, is the voice of common sense and reason (and also, one imagines, of the playwright), when he insists, ‘Is childhood a disorder?’ and ‘Can’t a boy just be a boy?’ Though the issue of medication is aired with some balance (Pinchot cleverly breaks out of character, confessing he couldn’t be on stage without his meds), the overriding message is about tolerating human deviation, and embracing nonconformity. After all, we’re asked, would Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ exist had the artist found a way to fit in? Along these same lines, though Jesse’s classroom behavior improves while on Ritalin, his spirit is clearly deadened. ‘He’s been watching the Weather Channel for three days’ Mama reports. And off the family goes on another path–this time to a homeopathic guru in the desert–to find peace for themselves and their child. A bright twist is how Jesse (Hudson Thames) never appears until the final act. This is after Mama takes the reins and decides all her son really needs is some old-fashioned love and attention. The moment has Lifetime Special written all over it. While the performances are good, especially the supporting cast (Johanna Day stands out as the loopy not-so-well-meaning neighbor with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), the play lacks depth and momentum. Loomer’s treatment feels more like a primer about ADD and less like a story about people grappling with the condition. No question the subject is ripe for greater debate, and Loomer is to be applauded for bringing it to the forefront. But with a production that comes across as more issue–than character–driven, one is left wondering if the stage is the best forum. ‘Distracted’ continues at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. through April 29. It plays at 8 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday and 2:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday. Contact: (213) 628-2772.
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