Little Doc

Most of the characters in Dan Klores’s Little Doc, set in 1975 Brooklyn, live in a sometimes literal haze of drugs. Booze, pot, coke, hash, junk: All are consumed with casual abandon by people yearning for escape but stuck in place. Ric (Adam Driver) is a former child wonder who has reneged on his early promise; Peggy (Joanne Tucker) is his girlfriend, who happens to be the wife of his best pal, Lenny (Billy Tangradi), a flower child gone to seed. Ric is used to getting away with things, but the world is catching up.

Klores bifurcates the action between Ric’s apartment and the bar downstairs—a hangout for Ric’s small-time hood of a father, Weasel (Steven Marcus), and a hard-nosed local crime boss, Manny (Dave Tawil), who has sent a goony enforcer (Salvatore Inzerillo) to check into whether Ric is trying to screw him on a drug deal. Klores is a documentary filmmaker, and his play, which sometimes suggests The Sopranos in a lower register, has moments of keen writing. But although John Gould Rubin’s staging features top-of-the-line design—David Rockwell did the sets, Clint Ramos the costumes—Little Doc doesn’t operate right. Klores’s occasionally slack script shoulders much of the blame. But it must also be said that Driver, who has done fine work elsewhere, doesn’t summon the charisma and pathos that might draw us into Ric’s story. As the play steers a tricky course through questions of responsibility and forgiveness, he seems unconfident at the wheel.

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