Yesterday is today

Denis Johnson digs up Purvis and Hoovers the past

By Robert Avila

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Denis Johnson's Purvis is the writer-playwright's fifth collaboration with Campo Santo, an occasion that marks another milestone by opening the company's 10th anniversary season. The results this time are admittedly uneven, but Johnson, the formidable talent behind a series of plays plumbing the frontiers of the American psyche continues to find a receptive and remarkably fruitful home with the company, which is in permanent residence at Intersection for the Arts.

Here seven discrete, interrelated scenes hurtle us backward from 1966 to 1934 along a trajectory designed to lay bare — in the heightened tone of Johnson's vivid, ecstatic blank verse — the real story of legendary FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Daryl Lozupone), tasked by J. Edgar Hoover himself in 1934 with bringing in notorious gangster and fugitive John Dillinger (Danny Wolohan). Purvis's all-American career arc travels from faceless government bureaucrat, to the popular image of the G-man used to sell Post Toasties, to apparent lonesome suicide. Our first glimpse of Purvis (played with fine understated Southern decorum by Lozupone) doesn't come until scene three, where, with a bullet hole in his head, he flits through the indistinct dreamworld of his old nemesis Dillinger on his way backward in time — a function of the death process, Dillinger assures him. We go on to see Purvis applying for a job as a radio spokesman before a starstruck former "junior G-man" (an outstanding Michael Torres); being fired by his jealous boss shortly after his meteoric rise to fame as "the man who collared Dillinger"; and overseeing the grim and fantastical details of the death of outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd (Michael Shipley).

But the play's concerns, which unfold in the systems and circumstances that hide behind the legends of outlaws and crime fighters, require the decentering of its eponymous subject. The action accordingly starts and ends some distance away from Purvis, beginning with a rollicking political grotesque: President Lyndon B. Johnson (Cully Fredricksen) and J. Edgar Hoover (Catherine Castellanos) playing gin rummy in the Oval Office, the figure of a man hanging from a noose in the background. The two men dance (at one point literally) around some as yet unclear point of contention, argue over LBJ's paranoid belief that the Mormons are extraterrestrials, nurse Hoover's vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr., and work up an alcohol-fueled sideshow showdown with the Chinese on the red phone. The backward story thus climaxes early, you could say, in LBJ's humping on the doomsday button. Then just as quickly it anticlimaxes, in a sudden awareness of impotence, as the commander in chief's nuclear warhead wilts in the sly all-encompassing shadow of Hoover's national security apparatus.

The dynamic will be echoed in the final scene when Baby Face Nelson teases Dillinger boy-to-boy about the size of his endowment — the legend must be as large down there as anywhere, but the reality inevitably pales.

These bracketing scenes present a larger framework, while functioning as imperfect mirror images of one another, and evoke a different trajectory altogether: from the center of power to what can pass for the last outpost of a rapidly fading frontier and its outlaw ethic. In each, uneasy allies are held together by the task (and pleasure) of doing battle with the world outside; each, incidentally, displays the inert body of a representative victim lying just offstage.

Looming behind it all, at least as large as Purvis (or Wolohan's sporting, charismatic Dillinger), is the figure of Hoover (played with cunning relish by Castellanos), whose objection to gangsters is of a piece with his objection to Purvis: He cannot abide their assertion of personality, let alone their larger-than-life reputation as folk heroes. Their inherently individual qualities undo Hoover's utopia, measured by the absolute control of even the most insignificant and ordinary lives. And so a story of evildoers and wholesome government men merely masks the turbid atmosphere and perverse moral calculus of the cold war home front (readily converted into today's emphasis on "homeland security").

These themes find a powerful pulse at times, in characters and scenes that can display the exaggerated but illuminating features of a graphic novel. Nonetheless, and despite the precise structure of the play's reverse chronology, a certain randomness tends to undercut the suspense. And the final scene (for all its entertaining aspects and actor-director Delia MacDougal's memorable turn as Baby Face Nelson) doesn't fully capture the underlying sense of moment it seems to be angling for. Still, the actors more than once scale the play's language to impressive peaks.

Purvis, the man and the legend, has been all but forgotten today, though names like Dillinger and Baby Face still register. (And Johnson, as if unwilling to cut loose the legend entirely, further holds out the tantalizing notion of Dillinger's retirement in Portland, Ore., where he luxuriates in the anonymity granted him by a case of mistaken identity.) But even if J. Edgar never entirely replaces or quashes the folk heroes of yesterday, he can nevertheless rest in hell quite satisfied with an infamy that (unlike Purvis or Dillinger) never really needed the status of legend in the first place. Hoover was already the future. *

PURVIS

Through March 20

Thurs.–Sun. (also Mon/20), 8 p.m.

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

$9–$20

(415) 626-3311

www.theintersection.org