Drama ‘Ragged Dick’ Belly-Flops Into Melodrama

Carl Sandburg, who lived in Chicago, used to say the slums will take their revenge. The concept has been around for a long time as a literary theme, to say nothing of its social reality. But maybe you have to come from Chicago to know what Sandburg meant.

Neal Bell appears to have only an approximate idea. He turned the theme on its head Monday night in Costa Mesa as the South Coast Repertory’s NewSCRipts continued with a play about the seamy side of life that takes its revenge on the slums. You got the feeling that Bell hasn’t come within miles of the streets.

This may have something to do with the fact that the 38-year-old playwright spent a lot of time, at least according to director Thomas Babe, researching the material for his two-act theater piece in the New York Public Library. Or it may have something to do with the fact that Bell, a Yale graduate, lives in suburban Darien, Conn.

Whatever the reason, “Ragged Dick,” which revolves around a tabloid hack who falls in love with a Chicago prostitute, has a tenuous connection with the subject it presumes to explore. As one member of the audience put it during the post-mortem discussion that customarily follows the NewSCRipt stage readings, Bell’s play was “highly symbolic rather than real.”

The time is 1895, the scene a New York tenement. Reporter Dick Hunter is getting ready to kick open a door in the middle of the night so a photographer can take a flash photo of huddled masses stacked on top of each other in their sleep. Dick wants the picture to prove that he doesn’t make up his stories: His last one--about the O’Houlihan triplets, who were raised by dogs--apparently went too far to be believed.

When the flash powder ignites, the resulting explosion illuminates the room and reveals a wide-awake woman sitting like an ethereal goddess among the slumbering bodies. She turns out to be Susan, a prostitute who descends, however feebly, from Stephen Crane’s “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets” and Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie.”

The photo ends up on the front page of the newspaper with the caption: “Children asleep at the feet of venereal specter.” By then, Dick is smitten. He also has the peculiar feeling he has seen Susan’s face before. And sure enough. . . .

. . . He has.

Seven years earlier, Susan saw a policeman throw a pipe bomb during the Haymarket riots in Chicago. The bomb killed four other cops and was blamed on anarchists. Dick covered the trial. It dawns on him that he used to see Susan among the courtroom spectators. It also happens that the policeman who threw the bomb knows Susan saw him do it.

Which is why she fled to New York in the first place. And wouldn’t you know it? The bomb thrower is tracking her! Di-di-di-DUMMMMM. Now that the front page photo has revealed her whereabouts, Susan has to flee again--this time to Hoboken.

Dick finds her and asks her to marry him but not before buying a talking chimpanzee (the play’s most credible character), adopting a runaway child and making the acquaintance of a guy called Jack the Ripper. Like they say, you hadda be there.

“Does anybody but me feel the play teeters into melodrama?” SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch asked the audience, which had spent more than two convoluted hours trying to dope out all of the above.

Babe, who directed the reading, apparently didn’t mind if it had belly-flopped into melodrama. “Would that be bad?” he countered. Bell didn’t hear the question. He spent the post-mortem dissection of his play backstage talking to the actors. Maybe he was trying to revive them. With one major exception--John Ellington as the chimp--they read their roles like zombies.

Bell, who has a fondness for two-word titles--”Cold Sweat,” “Raw Youth” and “Sleeping Dogs” are some of his other plays--is said to have taken this one from Horatio Alger. Titles can be inspiring. Perhaps we should take a moment to remember that Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” had as its first title “The Inside of His Head.”