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El Salvador

 ((Tiffany Theater, West Hollywood; 99 seats; $ 28 top))

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

As the play opens, bureau chief John Fletcher (Carmen Argenziano) nurses his weak stomach with a cocktail of Pepto Bismol and tequila while waiting for a transfer that will return him to New York in time to save a failing marriage.
 

When the camera crew staggers in, fresh from an engagement in which U.S. choppers were used to destroy a village, the men begin sparring verbally while they slap together a story built around Fuller's grim footage of a 10-year-old boy being shot by a sniper.

His wholesome assistant Skee (Tom Reynolds) hides his bottles when he can, and tries to keep peace among the bureau's other denizens: the smug novice McCutcheon (JC Mackenzie), who has breezed in from Gotham and has yet to leave the hotel room, though he's charged with writing the dispatches; Marcy Lafferty Shatner and Jeff Seymour present a play in one act by Rafael Lima; director, Seymour; set, Seymour; costumes, Kristen Anacker; lighting, Ken Booth; sound, Ross Davis. Opened June 19, 1996; reviewed June 28; runs through Aug. 11. Running time: 1 hour, 40 min.

Cast: Tom Reynolds (Skee), JC Mackenzie (Brad McCutcheon), Carmen Argenziano (John Fletcher), Jeff Seymour (Fuller), Patrick Cochran (Larry), Kevin Hunt (John Pinder), Annette Chavez (Rosita). Rafael Lima's "El Salvador" is a fairly sturdy piece of men-in-the-trenches drama, as this revival of the 1988 play reveals. The trenches in this case are journalistic: Six Americans covering the Latin American country's revolution -- and the U.S.' semi-covert involvement -- sweat out various conflicts inner and outer while holed up in the hotel room that doubles as the CBS news bureau. Never less than engaging, ably constructed and featuring several fine performances, the play nevertheless suffers from the uneasy clash of some stock dramatic situations being played out against a backdrop -- the horrors of the El Salvador conflict -- that demands something more ambitious.

McCutcheon's arrogance and ignorance are the tinder that ignite the chief conflicts. As the reporter on assignment, he adds his own gloss to the footage that doesn't sit well with Fuller, then demands that the crew take him out to view the death squads' favorite dumping sites, a suggestion jeered down by Fuller for its triteness and by Pinder for its deadliness.

When Pinder tries to make McCutcheon alive to the grim exigencies of the war, the play seems poised to move toward a deeper discussion of the discrepancies of fate. In a hypnotic voice, he tells with tactile detail how thousands of El Salvadoran "rebels" have met their ends, blindfolded and hog-tied in the back of a truck rattling toward certain death. It's a beautifully written speech -- and one of the few moments when the tragedy of the war comes alive.

But the play returns to more dramatically familiar matters fairly quickly, as Fletcher, with a painful case of VD, gets quietly drunk after receiving a Dear John letter from his wife; Pinder tries to get it on with a waiflike prostitute (to McCutcheon's great indignation); and various combinations of men almost come to blows.

Each character has been apportioned a dramatic moment of truth, and most actors acquit themselves well. Hunt is particularly compelling as Pinder, a strange mixture of tenderness and brutality. Argenziano is sharp and natural as the beleaguered bureau chief, and Cochran has a loping insecurity that brings a few needed layers to his role.

Only Seymour, who also directed the production, can't salvage his climactic moments; his speech about the "electronic leech" of television and its appetite for telegenic horrors is very heavy on the bombast, and his delivery doesn't lighten it. Seymour seems to have kept his fellow actors on a shorter leash than himself.

"El Salvador" has been written with intelligence and a sufficiency of dramatic flair, but its concerns -- the egos and consciences of a stock selection of men -- seem overblown when the grim pageant of the war in El Salvador, only intermittently portrayed, surrounds them.

Cameraman Fuller (Jeff Seymour), jaded and on edge, and his sound man Larry (Patrick Cochran), boyish and still shocked by the violence of the war; and John Pinder (Kevin Hunt), a seen-it-all-and-felt-nothing still-photographer who tags along when the team gets called to a battle site.