'The Rant' full of unsubtle mouthpieces

By Bill Hirschman | Special to the Sun Sentinel

The New Theatre world premiere of Andrew Case's The Rant is a promising work in progress that needs more work to progress.

Case's tale of an inquiry into a fatal police shooting of an autistic teenager contains lyrical writing and trenchant insights about the quixotic, doomed search for Truth with a capital T.

But to get his philosophies across, Case uses his characters as direct mouthpieces with all the subtlety of a ventriloquist pulling the string on a dummy. And to make those points, some of these people are nearly cartoonish in their extremes of cynicism, paranoia, prejudice and self-righteous bias.

A burned-out, opportunistic reporter tosses off facile double talk that no journalist would say in real life: "Sometimes the truth itself is a kind of bias" and "I no longer believe in fact; I believe in leverage."

And yet, Case follows that with incisively observed and beautifully written passages such as the recollection of an officer on the scene. The officer rejects fellow minorities' expectation that he will be black first and blue second, saying he has "failed to take up the family business of blame."

The story focuses on a driven police misconduct investigator who hates cops (Pilar Uribe) struggling through conflicting lie-laden and agenda-bending accounts of the shooting. Her problem is not the fungibility of perceptions; she's sorting out deliberate distortions by witnesses driven by self-interest and prejudices -- including her own.

Through her interviews with witnesses and the involvement of the reporter (Ricky Waugh), Case dramatizes a half-dozen important observations, such as how decades of racial prejudice cripple a community's pursuit of justice. Case also invests the situation with finely-observed details and nuances learned in his own years as a police misconduct investigator.

Though flawed, the script and the performances are undeniably moving and thought-provoking. Patrice DeGraff-Arenas' opening monologue of the anguished mother describing the killing in her statement to the investigator is electrifying. Reiss Gaspard delivers an equally anguished closing aria, a police officer's mea culpa that gets us as close to the truth as we're going to get.

The play moves on in the next few months to fresh mountings in Philadelphia and New Jersey where Case can fine-tune this worthy work.

Bill Hirschman can be reached at muckrayk@aol.com.

The drama The Rant is scheduled through Oct. 26.

Where: New Theatre, 4120 Laguna St., Coral Gables

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 1 p.m. Sundays; 5:30 p.m. Oct. 12, 19

Tickets: $15-$40; 305-443-5909 or new-theatre.org