By Leonard Jacobs

All three stories in Jordan Harrison’s Doris to Darlene: A Cautionary Valentine have been told before: young black girl swept into the 1960s music business by a mogul who falls in love with her; contemporary gay teen swept into appreciating opera by older gay teacher with whom he thinks he’s smitten; the “mad” King Ludwig of Bavaria, swept so far into his patronage of opera composer Richard Wagner that he turns his domain into a fantastical and tragically quasi-operatic playground. As for why Harrison intertwines the three tales, the jury, your honor, is hung.

Beginning the play with Doris—played by a true-blue discovery named de’Adre Aziza—doesn’t help. By titling the play as he does, Harrison implies that his two-act adventure is really all about Doris, but she is ultimately a cog in the playwright’s dramaturgical wheel. When drawing his characters, Harrison often does it so well that when he puts Doris together with Vic Watts—a Phil Spector-ish producer played with smarm and charm by Michael Crane—he could just as easily have stopped there and written a one-act. It’s an intriguing idea for a play: Watts worships Wagner, and the song that becomes Doris’ breakthrough hit is a riff on “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. But there is more to come, if indecipherably so.
While Les Waters, the director, blocks the play to take full advantage of it’s episodic structure, there’s little he can do about Harrison’s insistence upon having characters speak to us in third person. This is a distancing technique, not a method by which we can grow closer to the characters. No one wants to be told what they’re thinking and feeling or what we’re thinking and feeling; we want to be shown.

It also makes it more difficult to see thematic ties between Vic and Doris (he named her Darlene as he boosted her toward success) and the thin, fey Young Man, played by a winsome Tobias Segal, who shows up in Mr. Campani’s music class. Tom Nelis walks right up to the borderline of creating Mr. Campani as a stereotype—standing ramrod-straight, sporting an elegant moustache—but never crosses over; the Young Man aptly calls the teacher “shrewdly flamboyant.” Still, if the Young Man is discovering his gay gene, it’s hard to see him attracted to Mr. Campani, a former opera singer with mixed feelings about his life.

Like Doris and Vic, music is Mr. Campani’s salvation; it turns to be the same for the Young Man, though the idea that music can make you vomit is not one of Harrison’s more sophisticated tropes. Perhaps it isn’t love of music so much as love for love—as the Young Man learns when he tries seducing the school jock (great character work by Crane) and learns he’s gay for pay.

And then Harrison segues to Ludwig’s court, where the monarch’s admiration of Wagner does little to assuage the composer’s writer’s block. As Ludwig, Laura Heisler rocks the house—what a smart move to cast a woman in the role, for it implies everything we must know about Ludwig’s sexuality without etching it into the ornate narrative. David Chandler plays Wagner as tortured, megalomaniacal, but sympathetic by the end.
Waters puts much in place to assemble the strands—Kirsten Childs’ music, which turns the majesty of Wagner into the silk of Motown; Takeshi Kata’s austere setting; Christal Weatherly’s character-conveying costumes—but Harrison’s final coda remains unclear. Could it still be in the soaring arias that lurk inside his imagination? I hope so.

Through Dec. 23. Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. (betw. 9 & 10th Aves.), 212-279-4200; $65.