New Patagonia
Seattle Repertory Theatre, 443-2222. Through Dec 23.

I REALLY WANTED to like New Patagonia: Elizabeth Heffron is a local playwright who's worked in some of Seattle's fine fringe venues, and she's finally at the Rep; she's female; and the material (the odd legacies of the '60s) has incredible potential. But this show is a real disappointment. After the first act, my friend and I looked at each other and said, "Maybe it'll get better in the second act." It didn't.

In l997, Karl Kroeger, an aging literary-cultural hero from the l960s, is dying. As his name indicates, he's sort of a takeoff on Ken Kesey, a guy who became as famous for his drug- and sex-fueled parties/happenings as he was for his writing. Kroeger is also a variation of Kesey's East Coast counterpart Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard prof who advised us to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," and who performed his ultimate drop-out, his death from cancer, live on the Internet.

Before Leary's stunt, Heffron was already writing about Kroeger having his death filmed. Rather than junk the play, she thought (as she told The Stranger in an interview), "What would Karl do? He'd want to one-up the guy." "One-upping the guy" is too much of what this play is about: the assholishness of a pre-feminist male ego, as well as the women who have, happily for this pig of a guy, remained brainlessly fuckable. These gender roles could make for some interesting social critique if this show were set in the l960s, but it's supposed to be l997! Karl Kroeger (John Seitz) is also supposed to be dying, but this big, burly guy shouts and stamps his way through the show. With the exception of two brief scenes in which he gets injections in his butt from his black female nurse (Cynthia Jones)--who, we are also informed, he "balls" regularly--there's nothing in this character's physical or verbal presence that indicates he's mortally ill.

After being estranged for 16 years, Kroeger's son Jesse (Quentin Mare) comes back, at his father's request, to film a final Woodstock-like festival Kroeger is staging around his own death. Fortunately, this son's rebellion against his father does not take the stereotypical shape of his becoming a Republican or an accountant, but pretty much everything else about this father-son drama is predictable. Like his father, Jesse has had a kid with a junkie girlfriend, and been separated from the kid's mother. Unlike his father, Jesse tries to be a responsible single parent to his son, John-John (Jesse Lee Thomas). Jesse blames Karl not only for abandoning him, but also for the death--okay, this next part is not predictable, but only because it's so outlandishly melodramatic--by dismemberment (!!) of Jesse's sister, Bunny. Only during the festival does Jesse realize that Karl has grieved Bunny's death and their estrangement. Jesse learns his father had tried to contact him, and, after a couple of blowups, father and son are able to, as we knew they would, forgive each other.

The other important person who returns from Kroeger's past is Roxie (Lori Larsen), a burned-out groupie now making her home in Bellingham. Larsen is a wonderful actress, but the comedy of this part is pretty awful. In her embarrassingly unflattering blue jeans, midriff shirt, and high-heel fuck-me shoes, Roxie tries to make moves on Jesse. After she smells her stinky pits, this cartoon character heads to the shower, where she invites Kroeger to come in for a screw while she's wet. The only other female character is the earth-mothery, peacemaking, nurturing black maid, dressed in a white uniform. While the script aims to create some sympathy for Kroeger as this flawed man who did not do right by his son, it exhibits no awareness whatsoever of the patronizing way he has treated--and continues to treat--women, or any sense that either female had a life or mind before or outside of taking care of this man.

Setting the story in the l990s requires some kind of acknowledgment of the larger outside issues that affected masculine identity in the U.S. in the '60s--e.g., the Vietnam War, feminism. Instead we're given a cartoony, simplistic take on a tired old father-and-son story--a waste of a playwright capable of inventive work, and some otherwise powerful actors.