As far as subjects for a play go, Mike McAlary is a pretty great choice. In the 1990s, the big-mouthed, big-hearted tabloid journalist embodied both tough-guy reporting and the gritty Gotham he covered.
There’s a gold mine of material in all this: blood and ink, the Giuliani years, newspaper rivalries — McAlary worked for New York Newsday, The Post and the Daily News — and a charismatic scribbler with a “Magnum, P.I.” mustache.
And yet Dan Klores’ ham-fisted new play, “The Wood,” hardly ever gets dramatic traction.
“The Wood” is newspaper slang for the front-page tabloid headlines coveted by the driven, competitive McAlary (John Viscardi, in an adequate performance). He got plenty of them thanks to his coverage of the Abner Louima story in 1997 — unhinged police brutality in Brooklyn — which won him a Pulitzer Prize.
The case makes up the play’s material and emotional core. It’s given extra urgency by the fact that during all this, McAlary was undergoing chemo for the colon cancer that killed him the following year at 41.
Clearly, Klores — a p.r. czar turned filmmaker turned playwright — genuinely loves this crazy city’s rough fabric.
Too bad his writing is so lifeless.
The focus alternates between Louima (Vladimir Versailles) and background on the columnist, the latter told via heavy-handed reminiscences and exposition — awkwardly, most of those scenes are for the benefit of McAlary’s oncologist.
The Louimas themselves are treated like clichéd immigrants. When Micheline (Melanie Charles) happily tells Abner, “In New York, anything can happen,” hours before he’s assaulted by policemen, our reaction isn’t empathy but: Uh-oh, clunky foreshadowing!
That’s typical for Klores, who has little ear for either dialogue or pacing. Even a key confrontation between McAlary and accused cop Justin Volpe (Michael Carlsen) is limp. You’re better off reading McAlary’s own account of that meeting, a terse column boiling with restrained fury.