Mojo
By Albert Williams
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None of this would matter if Mojo stood on its own as thought-provoking theater with something meaningful or at least fresh to say. But it doesn’t. This raunchy melodrama about power struggles in the British rock scene of the late 1950s is heavy on attitude and energy but light on substance–a strutting showcase of “rock ‘n’ roll acting” (a much-overused term in any case) whose torrents of raw language and perverse, comic-ugly violence seem fabricated shock effects rather than the urgent expression of a deeply felt story and characters. A young man is hung upside down in shackles; another is tied spread-eagle and bare-ass naked over a jukebox and tortured with a cutlass (a cutlass?). The drama’s climax finds a person bleeding to death onstage after being shot in the head with a derringer–a “small gun,” as one sexually charged joke puts it, but effective nonetheless. These graphic scenes are augmented by grisly descriptions of a man cut in half and another run over by a lawn mower. Yet none of this carries any emotional or moral weight. David Mamet’s American Buffalo, David Rabe’s Streamers, and Alan Bowne’s Forty Deuce, all of which Mojo recalls if not overtly imitates, convey larger resonances through the bravado posturing and testosterone turf wars of their foolish, confused antagonists–and they burn with the emotional investment their authors placed in every one of the characters. But Mojo’s combatants seem mere contrivances to push the plot along; while the cast have plenty of fun with their roles’ oddball idiosyncrasies, the performances come off as behavioral studies for their own sake.
Butterworth, who was 26 when he wrote this play, has a flair for raunchily rhythmic dialogue–the first scene, with the sad sacks Potts and Sweets wallowing in their dreams of wealth and women, gets the play off to a darkly hilarious start. But its promise quickly dissipates as Butterworth focuses on the struggle between Baby and Mickey, two clockwork characters whose rivalry generates some short-term interest but no larger significance. Though Mojo (whose title carries a plethora of sexual, musical, mystical, and pharmacological implications) seems to be making a point about generational change, as the youthful Baby sweeps aside the older show-biz hacks to make his own way in the world of rock ‘n’ roll, the play’s paltry payoff hardly seems worth the outrageous action and intricate scheming that lead to it. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”–that seems to be the message of Mojo, and it was a cliche when the Who wailed it 25 years ago.
