In case you didn’t know it yet, drugs are bad. That’s the not-very-revelatory message of Dael Orlandersmith’s “Horsedreams,” her “Reefer Madness”- style drama about the evils of cocaine and heroin addiction.
The chief twist provided by this Pulitzer Prize-nominated dramatist (“Yellowman”) is that the addicts depicted here aren’t inner-city minority youth trapped in poverty but rather upper-class suburban whites. Otherwise, nary a single cliché is left unturned.
The main characters are Desiree (Roxanna Hope) and Loman (Michael Laurence) — read into those names what you will — who meet in a Manhattan nightclub and marry soon after.
Desiree, a flame-haired party girl, is soon bored with her type-A lawyer husband and life in the suburbs. Even though she’s now a mother, she starts snorting cocaine, which inevitably leads to heroin. But when her racist tendencies rise to the surface and she makes the mistake of calling her black dealer an “ape,” she not so accidentally suffers a fatal overdose.
Loman, whose equally casual racism is revealed in his comment that he can’t believe his wife was doing that “lowlife ghetto s – – t,” tries to raise his son Luka (Matthew Schechter) by himself, but eventually hires a nanny, Mira (played by Orlandersmith).
At first taking solace in heavy drinking Loman eventually becomes a junkie himself. Meanwhile, Mira, who grew up in the projects and is well acquainted with the ravages of drugs, looks on with disgust and increasing concern.
Related in Orlandersmith’s trademark style of poetic monologues — the term “Lexington 125,” where the couple go to score their drugs, is repeated like a mantra — “Horsedreams” is both obvious and deadly dull. With the exception of young Matthew, who’s terrifically natural, the performers are unable to overcome their stereotypical roles, with director Gordon Edelstein not adding much. Only Takeshi Kata’s striking abstract set design, with its large backdrop marked by a jagged crack, sticks in the mind.