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Certainly, no such Miller/Shepard-style finesse is expected from UNLV grad-student playwrights, whose works are showcased in Nevada Conservatory Theatre's New Plays Repertory Festival. And Nakia Oglesby's Click-Boom, with its Iraq-war plot trigger, has the nominal advantage of topicality-which withers without believability or originality. This is yet another entry in the atrocities-of-war-haunt-a-man's-homecoming oeuvre, lent hallucinatory overtones by a pair of guest ghosts. And it can leave audiences suffering from post-dramatic stress disorder, trying to reconcile the intensity of the subject with the onstage inertia.
The intermission-less Click-Boom plays out in the South Carolina garage of Daniel (Dylan Rikio Morris), a photojournalist recently returned from Iraq and reunited with his love, Sara (Latoya Williams) and (it appears) his gung-ho, Vietnam-vet dad (Robert Daymond Howard). Tense and nearly monosyllabic, Daniel claims to barely remember Sara and evades a barrage of questions from Pop about his desert deployment. It isn't long before we realize that Daniel witnessed and snapped photos of a horrifying slaughter of Iraqis that left him psychologically scarred and mentally seesawing between reality and illusion as he conjures the image of a massacred Iraqi girl (Abby Solano) and his dad, who is hectoring him from beyond the grave, having killed himself years earlier. Sara, meanwhile, is initially elated, then angered by her distant, disoriented husband, unsure how to live with this troubled soul.
Eventually, Daniel emerges from his self-imposed emotional exile, the awful memory receding as he recalls more of his life with Sara. But winning the Pulitzer Prize for his photos (shown as actual war shots on an overhead screen) bounces him back to his personal hell as he reveals his guilt-fueled pain in a two-word admission: "I watched." The bleak climax, prodded by Daniel's apparitions, arrives with all the punctuality and predictability of an on-time train.
Click-Boom wants to plunge us into Daniel's anguish, but is content merely to state its thesis of war's suspension of decency, in both aggressive and passive forms, and assign characters to act it out like some live-action term paper. Oglesby has tossed out some ideological red meat on the evils of war-well-chewed on stage, screen and television for decades-without seasoning it with character complexities that elevate a play beyond an intellectual exercise. We need reasons to care about Daniel before we can invest in what befalls him, especially given his drastic final act. But we're provided virtually no back story, no insight into who he is before he's traumatized, making him less a recognizable human than a plot vessel for the playwright to imbue with symbolism-itself as subtle as a meat cleaver to the skull (Daniel is unnerved by screaming children setting off firecrackers outside). That leaves Morris, his portrayer, with little to carve a three-dimensional person out of except incremental despair.
As a character that could have been constructed as an audience surrogate, attempting to comprehend a horror we've never experienced firsthand, Sara is instead a self-centered whiner, consumed primarily by how her husband's erratic behavior inconveniences her life, with fleeting flashes of concern. As written, she's a harpy without enough heart to give Williams a shot at making her interesting. Solano's Iraqi girl has the excuse of being a literal symbol, crawling around the corners of Daniel's guilt (i.e., shadowing him onstage). Only Howard has anything remotely intriguing to play, ironically pulling some life out of the dead dad whose battle-honed bluster echoes in his son's disturbed soul. And at least Solano and Howard get to bathe in Happy Robey's chilling, spectral lighting, the only thing remotely illuminating about this play.