JHU Theater's USA is a weak stab at the Dos Passos classic - The Astin/Dunn-directed production buckles under the breadth of the work itself despite a strong cast.

Since the Declaration of Independence, the people of this country have sought to understand just what it means to be an American, and literary minds from Twain to Steinbeck have conceived images of America in service of a vast spectrum of intellectual, cultural and political ideologies. Once the search for collective identity got started, it never slowed down. Out of this quest for understanding came the USA trilogy, written by Chicago-born Jazz Age novelist John Dos Passos.

The trilogy's three novels, The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936), paint a series of fragmented pictures of the nation, colorfully written and interspliced with movie montage-style newsreel sections that list soundbites about current events and pop culture advertisements that focus on the last few years of and the period immediately following World War One.

The novels have a distinctly socialist bent, and unlike the work of his Lost Generation colleagues Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Dos Passos focuses on the lives of common, working-class Americans. His heroes are not the maudlin romantics of the English nobility and the American industrialist leisure class; they are the pawns who get knocked over by the games of the rich, and who are driven-naturally, as Dos Passos sees it-to the workers' movements of Eugene V. Debs or the John Birch Society.

The USA trilogy was adapted for the stage in 1959 by Dos Passos and playwright Paul Shyre, and this past Friday saw the opening night performance of U.S.A. by the Johns Hopkins University Theater (formally the Hopkins Studio Players), directed by John Astin and Loren Dunn and staged at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This is the second production of the season for Astin, the legendary Hopkins alumnus and professor who made the TV's Gomez Addams so memorable.

Astin and Dunn-a Hopkins graduate of the class of 2004 and now a member of the faculty in the Homewood Arts Workshops, teaching acting and directing classes alongside his mentor-are getting used to working together. But their interpretation of USA was flawed beyond the opening night butterflies from which its cast was obviously suffering. The play never settled into a solid footing, as erratic staging decisions and unreliable periodicity made the play seem like an impotent, uninspired reading of a work that, in novel form, is a tour de force of vigor and artistry.

The play opens with a monologue by sophomore James Zwerneman which is taken almost verbatim from the prologue to The 42nd Parallel. Each cast member plays a variety of characters, returning to different roles at different poi- nts in the play, but Zwereneman's primary role is that of J.Ward Moorehouse, an energetic young professional who works his way up from lowly dispatch reporter for a Pittsburgh newspaper to president of a public relations firm. Along the way, he falls in love with Gertrude Staple (sophomore Liz Gilbert), the beautiful but unstable daughter of a wealthy industrialist, fights in the war and makes friends with Dick Savage (sophomore Chunwoo Kae), E.R. Bingham (sophomore Anthony Blaha) and other businessmen. He inspires admiration from his impressionable stenographer Janey Williams (sophomore Tania Hamod), but arouses his wife's jealousy by befriending the charming and refined Eleanor Stoddard (junior Elspeth Kursh).

Ward's story is sweeping American epic that touches on the issues of corporate morality, ambition and reward, and the social ills of the industrial complex, which Dos Passos conceives of as a massive public relations scheme, but the play hardly has time to give these issues sufficient attention. Part of this is a problem one of adaptation: it is impossible to cram the material covered in Dos Passos' three novels into a two-hour stage show.

But even more troublesome are the adaptations of the newsreel sections and several sections from the written works that described the lives of cultural figures such as Debs, Isadora Duncan and Henry Ford, which became monologues in the stage version. The newsreels could have been treated sufficiently in a film, but as Astin and Dunn arranged it, the actors merely stood side-to-side facing the audience, shouting out headlines. The result was an unimaginative elementary school pageant-style scene interjected every three scenes or so, and it did not capture the spirit or avant-garde pace of Dos Passos' writing in the equivalent sections of the novel.

Likewise, in the novel, the profiles of famous figures served to remind the reader of the context of the story and the personalities that shaped the era, but their adaptation to monologue form did not do justice to the original. In the play there was no disaffected workman character, as there was in the novels, so the monologue about the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was irrelevant. The appearance of famed dancer Isadora Duncan was similarly awkward. It was as if Shyre and Dos Passos tried to adapt an epic without the proper tools on an inappropriately miniature scale.

With these sorts of problems, it's hard to distribute blame between a poor adaptation and poor production, but at other times, the cast and crew seemed more clearly accountable. Ward and Gertrude's first kiss was awkwardly-staged, with Zwereneman's back to the audience, and a scarcity of props and music piped in at odd moments made for off-kilter transitions and a dull aesthetic. Astin and Dunn didn't even take the time to make sure that all their actors spoke with period accents: Blaha and Kursh were in somewhat appropriate voices, but each exclamation from Gilbert and Hamod had a clearly 21st-century cadence. The play was set in and around 1917, and lets face it, people talked durn funny back then.

However, Blaha and Zwereneman's performances carried the production. Blaha was the only member of the cast who was able to vary his character for each persona he played, and Zwereneman performed with confidence and repose. Gilbert acted with the same intensity and overstatement that she uses onstage with the Buttered Niblets and in last year's production of Talking With. Hamod and Kursh had less opportunity to develop their various roles, but ended up producing solid performances and Hamod even sang at one point in a powerful, moving alto that would add grace to any musical theater performance. Kae seemed to have difficulty shifting between characters and remembering lines, and probably wasn't the best choice for his part.

JHU Theater's production of USA was ragged at best, and a big disappointment from the two (arguably) best theater directors on campus. But the challenge they took upon themselves was big - half of the show's flaws were written into the script. Hopefully their next production will be more appropriate in scope, vision and taste.