There are several good people involved in “Clive,” including director/star Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio, back onstage after years in the “Law & Order” trenches. For their sake and ours, let’s pretend this misguided, pretentious flame-out never happened.
“Clive,” which just opened at the Acorn Theatre, updates Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal,” from 1918. The original concerns a dissolute, destructive poet who leaves a trail of misery and death before meeting his end. In playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman’s version for the New Group, the title character (Hawke) is a dissolute, destructive grunge rocker who leaves a trail . . . well, you know the rest.
Sherman kept Brecht’s episodic structure and his occasional use of songs, and moved the action to 1990s New York. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, baby! Too bad it’s as phony as a ’60s TV show about hippies.
The first big set piece takes place in the pad of Clive’s producer, Mech (Brooks Ashmanskas), where Clive, sporting a guitar and leather breeches, snorts coke off a woman’s breasts. Or rather, her cleavage: For a show that’s about the corruption of flesh and soul, “Clive” is strangely coy, even prudish.
Clive’s soul mate is the bald, hulking Doc (D’Onofrio), whose handlebar mustache is right out of “Sons of Anarchy” — or rather “Cruising,” considering the men’s ambiguous relationship. Generally, it’s unclear what Doc’s about, partly because D’Onofrio speaks in a broad Southern accent unlike any other onstage. But then, it’s hard to say what anything or anybody is about here.
Brecht pioneered distancing effects to prevent the audience from getting emotionally caught up. Sherman (whose 2007 bust, “Things We Want,” Hawke also directed) follows suit by having the characters describe what they’re doing, essentially reciting their stage directions.
“I drop my dress, then pick it up and put it on,” says Joanna (Zoe Kazan, in one of several roles), who drowns herself after being deflowered and discarded. To her credit, Kazan gives “Clive” its only genuinely tense moment when she begs Clive: “Hit me. Will that make you feel better? Hit me!”
And then we’re back to the annoying stage tricks and random bursts of song — adding insult to insult, one is Brecht and Weill’s “Alabama Song” (“Show me the way to the next whiskey bar . . .”).
The sibling duo known as Gaines is credited with creating the “sound sculptures” found around Derek McLane’s shabby-industrial set. Those musical interludes at least distract from Sherman’s purple prose: “My soul is the twinkle in the eyes of two insects that want to eat each other,” Clive declares.
He eventually crawls out into oblivion. The show will eventually follow suit, and everybody can move on.