The Road Theatre’s three-year streak of winners ends with Angela J. Davis’s convoluted, uninvolving The Spanish Prayer Book, the company’s 2019-2020 World Premiere season opener.

The prayer book in question is one of several illustrated Hebrew manuscripts smuggled out of Nazi Germany and currently scheduled to be auctioned off in London by family of the late Rabbi Jacob Adler (Allan Wasserman), a German Jew who escaped to the West around the same time the manuscripts headed off in the same direction.

Profiting in the millions from the sale will be Jacob’s adulterous English widow Joan (Laura Gardner) and the couple’s divorced American daughter Michaela (Allison Blaize), a laid-off teacher in dire need of cash to pay her anemic daughter’s sky-high medical bills.

Problems arise when Michaela and father’s handsome Muslim-American protégé Julien Nazir (Richard-John Seikaly) check out the manuscripts in question and Michaela finds herself mesmerized by what we are told is their magical mystical beauty.

Then, when the legality of the Adler family’s right to profit is called into question, what for Michaela had been a question of “to sell or not to sell” is complicated by possibly devastating legal consequences.

This already confusing narrative becomes even harder to follow when flashbacks to Berlin circa 1941 introduce us to 50something rabbi Alexander Adler (Carlos Lacámara) and dark-haired beauty Channa Wild (Tiffany Wolff), librarian at the Hebrew Institute, and their attempts to smuggle the aforementioned manuscripts out of Nazi hands.

If The Spanish Prayer Book’s tangled plot were its only minus, I might still have found myself engaged throughout its two-hour running time.

Unfortunately, what playwright Davis describes as “the allure of sacred objects, the ethical issues generated by cultural treasures displaced during wartime, and the power of art to forge human connections” ended up lost on me, nor did I care all that much about Davis’s characters or take to Jacob’s and Alexander’s frequent reappearances as ghosts or the cliched dream sequence in which Michaela finds herself surrounded by competing advice-givers.

Though Blaize manages to dig deep under Lee Sankowich’s direction and Wolff has some powerful moments, the cast as a whole (completed on opening night by Amy Tolsky and alternate Nancy Fassett) are left to do what they can with the script they’ve been given.

Designer Yumi Izumihara scores high marks for some lovely Spanish Book images, but locale-establishing projections on her stark grey set are often washed out by Derrick McDaniel’s otherwise effective lighting design. Kate Bergh’s period-and-present-day costumes are top-notch as are properties designer Heath Harper’s weathered manuscripts and David B. Marling’s mood-establishing sound design.

Ann Hearn Tobolowsky is assistant director. Bruce Katzman, Ruman Kazi, Ivy Khan, Paris Perrault, Tracey Silver, and Stephen Tobolowsky complete The Spanish Prayer Book’s alternate cast.

Maurie Gonzalez is stage manager and Alissa Adair is assistant stage manager.

The Spanish Prayer Book is produced by Laurie Bernhard/SPARK Theatrical and Zeljka Gortinski.

World Premiere plays are a gamble for theater companies and audiences alike. Sometimes the wager pays off, as it did for the Road in last season’s Friends With Guns, Death House, and The Rescued. Unfortunately, in the case of The Spanish Prayer Book, it does not.

The Road Theatre, NoHo Senior Arts Colony, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.
www.RoadTheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
September 20, 2019
Photos: Brian M. Cole

Tags: Angela J. Davis, Los Angeles Theater Review, The Road Theatre Company