Where Big Brother lurks

The words “timelier than ever” have wreathed George Orwell’s “1984” since its publication in 1949, but could there be anything more Orwellian than the current “war on terrorism”?

This unenviable backdrop of ours, with its daily headlines registering the curtailment of civil liberties for indeterminate national security imperatives, sharpens the urgency of the Actors’ Gang staging of “1984,” which opened Saturday at the Ivy Substation under the direction of company artistic director Tim Robbins. If the piece doesn’t quite possess the imagination to recommend itself on purely theatrical terms, at least it stands by a writer who doesn’t need updating to make us feel the awful relevance of his truth.

In fact, the only jarring anachronism is a joke at the top of the production involving Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You.” In Michael Gene Sullivan’s adaptation, Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist whose fundamental guilt lies in his recalcitrant autonomy, has already been taken prisoner. Here, he’s subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of having the Dolly Parton song looped into his cell ad nauseam.

It’s a winking reminder that the fictional world unfolding on Richard Hoover and Sibyl Wickersheimer’s sleek, black detention-center set isn’t completely removed from our own. But other than the sound of American rather than British accents, there’s no attempt to translate the piece into something more topical. Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon figures, yet the analogies are unavoidable all the same.

And how could it be otherwise when Sullivan does such an exemplary job of distilling “1984’s” political essence? As a novelist, Orwell wasn’t of the first tier, but he remains unsurpassed as a commentator on power’s ingrained patterns of corruption. He’s also a brilliant wielder of English prose, deft at finding idioms that lay bare mind-sets, and forensic in his deployment of the vocabulary of doom.

Which perhaps explains why the company’s overly broad performance style was such a liability. Orwell may dwell in types, but he endows even minor figures of his tale with a precision of speech that resonates beyond the limits of his imperfect storytelling. Brent Hinkley, bruised, shackled and disheveled, makes a harrowing Winston, yet his cast members often fall into lazy caricature when moving from grilling party members to the inhabitants of Winston’s past.

The acting, in truth, often seemed like animation. As Julia, Winston’s treasonously randy girlfriend, Kaili Hollister has the tendency to shriek for emphasis, while Brian T. Finney and V.J. Foster draw reductive distinctions between their characters.

More subtle is Steven M. Porter, who in addition to playing a vindictive party member, occasionally shadows as a second Winston, whose torturous correction builds to a crescendo of totalitarian horror. As O’Brien, Keythe Farley lends a bureaucratic sadist the touch of an ideological aesthete.

The production design is generally first-rate. Bosco Flanagan’s lighting heightens the menace with a terrifying glow whenever a masked agent of Big Brother flashes into view. David Robbins’ industrial sound design underscores the sense of a paranoid reality come to fruition.

Dramatically, “1984” is tough to pull off onstage. The first half of the novel establishes the bombed-out bleakness of modern life, with its restrictions, privations, ready violence and oppressive fears. Winston picks his way through this catastrophic landscape, trying to preserve a corner of his skull for sensual memory and free thought. The diary that he illegally keeps (and which inevitably functions less effectively in a play) is even more an expression of his will to live than the sex he furtively enjoys with Julia.

The adaptation, forced to telescope the plot, begins after Winston has already been caught, his diary exposed and his girlfriend carted away. Necessary as this may be, it never allows you to experience the budding of Winston’s hope in a charred field -- and, consequently, the full emotional toll of its subsequent decimation.

Nonetheless, Sullivan and Robbins manage to communicate the pointed richness of Orwell’s thought. When Winston starts reciting from a heretical source the nature of modern warfare as a barbarity that seems normal when “committed by one’s own side,” you can’t help but lower your head in recognition. Just so the bull’s-eye economic observation: “Any war effort is always planned to eat up whatever surplus might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population.”

The Actors’ Gang production may not fully succeed in re-creating “1984” for the stage, but it knows how to clear a path for its trenchant, and still sadly undated, critique.

*

‘1984’

Where: The Actors’ Gang at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Boulevard, Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays

Ends: April 8

Price: $25

Contact: (310) 838-4264 or www.theactorsgang.com

Running time: 2 hour, 5 minutes