STAGE REVIEW : Plot Boils With Anger in ‘Kitchen’

One reason family values has entered the political landscape is that it’s so adaptable. Rather than being fundamental, the term is actually--no pun intended--relative. Whatever their values, every family can champion the idea.

And some families will go very far doing so, as Thomas George Carter shows in his play “Hells Kitchen Ablaze.” This is not the Ozzie and Harriet nuclear unit, however. To be sure, listeners may be excused if they confuse the cops communing in the play’s warehouse in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen district with mafiosos.

More than one guy refers to their group as La Famiglia --partly out of deference to the majority of Italian-Americans among them, partly as a jab to this clan’s non-Italians. (Carter even dubiously suggests that there’s something about Italian familial loyalties that drives the violence here.) Like gangsters, they have their enemies, their codes, their paranoias.

Oh boy, do they have their paranoias.

When it is running on all eight cylinders, “Hells Kitchen Ablaze” is a churning pot boiling with distrust, dread, threats and face-offs, as these drug-busting cops discover the real price for taking some of the retrieved drug money for themselves. What they eventually find out is so unsettling that you just want to sit for a while, and calm down. You certainly don’t want to see director Ron Max’s actors come out, smile and take a curtain call. This is Blood City, and there’s no room for it.

It’s odd that Carter hasn’t insisted on this, since he has worked with the anti-curtain call master himself, John Steppling. Other than this, almost nothing violates the pressure-cooker world created by Max, his actors and designer Robert W. Zentis’ set and lights, cunningly exploiting every dingy nook and cranny of the newly christened Hudson BackStage (in what used to be the Lhasa Club).

Indeed, for far too long into Carter’s play, you wonder if it’s nothing but atmosphere. Max’s ensemble comes together, mingles and clowns around for such stretches of time that it comes to resemble the movie John Cassavetes never made. We’re deep into actors’ Method school here, chock-full of itchy male bravado and bursts of emotional purging, as when David Proval’s Carmine releases a jeremiad against blacks.

Eventually, the individuals in La Famiglia come into focus, and so does the internal logic of Carter’s drama, based on two simple notions: Money corrupts, and what unifies you can kill you.

“No weak links,” utters Sal Landi’s powerful, cold-blooded Marian, which could also be a code for this cast. George Simonelli’s Stromboli, who cooked up the scheme, truly blurs the line between cop and thug. Marc Alaimo’s Gibraltar-like Gino is the father figure at pains to keep the family’s factions at peace. Talbot Perry Simons’ Bossano keeps thinking someone--anyone--is bugged, and you wonder if he’s right. Ronald Hunter’s Michael feels the wrath of God coming on, with the DEA just behind.

They and other characters are all caught in the final caldron of violence in this Hell’s Kitchen, which is as oddly precise as the earlier passages are messy. It’s a case of the Method giving way to more serious business.

“Hells Kitchen Ablaze,” Hudson BackStage, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. $15; (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.