A Strong Cast Adds Depth to Shadowy ‘Lake Street Extension’

It may look like an ordinary basement bedroom, but it’s really a shadow world--a land of waking nightmares.

Two young men find themselves sharing it in the Lee Blessing drama “Lake Street Extension”: an American, who relives molestation by his father, and a Salvadoran, who flashes back to psychological torture at the hands of his country’s army.

Reality gives way to allegory as their stories expand into a larger lament about the horrors that swaggering, patriarchal societies sometimes inflict on their youth.

This is daring, visceral material, but it’s also muddled and off-putting.

Even when performed with commitment--as it is in a Theatre District production at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood--it never quite coalesces.

No wonder, then, that this 1992 script exists in near obscurity among such Blessing plays as “A Walk in the Woods” and “Eleemosynary.”

“Lake Street” is set in an unnamed city in the northern United States, near the Mississippi River. Events unfold mostly in flashbacks to 1982, when the 20-ish Trace (Christian Holiday) makes an unannounced visit home--only to find a young Salvadoran refugee occupying his boyhood bedroom.

Trace’s troubled, divorced father, Fuller (David Rousseve), is trying to reform himself through religion, and he’s housing Gregorio (Julian Andrei) on behalf of his church. Trace’s visit shatters Fuller’s good Samaritan fantasy and revives a painful past.

Those long-ago horrors come racing back when a moment of playfulness--Fuller rendering Trace helpless while tickling him--goes on several seconds too long and becomes something else. Gregorio witnesses the incident with dawning awareness and, soon, his past bubbles to the surface too.

Scary little squalls build out of nowhere in Mario Lescot’s carefully modulated staging, and Holiday gives a haunting performance as Trace--still very much a boy, in many ways, yet used up and tossed aside.

Too bad their fine work can’t clarify this script.

*

“Lake Street Extension,” Theatre District at the Cast, 804 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends May 12. $10-$15; Thursdays, pay what you can. Information: (323) 957-2343. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.