Leif Gantvoort’s powerful lead performance and Danny Cistone’s ingenious production design are the chief selling points of Robo & Bash’s production of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984. Its tonally off first act and less accomplished supporting cast not so much.

As anyone familiar with Orwell’s 1949 novel can tell you, 1984 imagines a future in which conformity is celebrated, creativity is despised, a despotic leader known only as “Big Brother” sees all and knows all, and slogans like “War is peace” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength,” nonsensical as they may sound, are considered immutable truths … and woe betide anyone who dares to think otherwise.

Gantvoort’s Winston Smith is just such an outlier, which is probably why he’s the only one to question this morning why fellow office drone Withers’ desk has been cleared of all personal paraphernalia as if he never existed.

He’s probably also the only Ministry Of Truth worker to see Withers’ replacement Julia (Shelly Spellman) as something other than just another cog in the machine, or to notice how attractive is, even in the drab, one-style-fits-all uniform he and everyone else in the office is made to wear.

Even more momentous than Julia’s arrival is her sudden declaration of love, one that prompts the newly minted couple to rent a secret love nest from a landlord (Mark Tracy) whose advanced age means he can still remember the days before “Thought Police” roamed the city in search of anyone not adhering to the party line.

Can love survive in a world where human affection is banned? Does the apartment’s apparent lack of a surveillance camera mean that Winston and Julia can escape Big Brother’s all-seeing eye? Can Inner Party member O’Brien (Eddie Alfano) be trusted when he informs them that he is on their side?

Though the world George Orwell envisioned back in 1949 is more North Korea than even the USSR at its most repressive, Robo & Bash’s intimate-stage revival of Robert Owens, Wilton E. Hall Jr. and William A. Miles Jr.’s 1963 stage adaptation of the required-reading classic could not be more timely than it is today. (A scene in which an office worker goes about deleting any word deemed even the slightest bit anti-party seems particularly prophetic in 2025.)

 And leading man Gantvoort is so riveting as the fed-up and furious Winston that just about everyone else on stage, save an appropriately intimidating Alfano and a folksy Tracy, seems like lightweights by comparison.

It doesn’t help either that director Cistone goes for an overly jaunty tone in the play’s early scenes, one that provides little sense of how grim, drab and colorless these office workers’ lives are. Nor does it help that there is little age diversity among Winston’s fellow office drone. (A character described in the script as “a jovial stupid and unpleasant looking woman approaching middle age” looks here to be in her 20s, and unpleasant-looking she is not.)

That’s not to say that Nicholas Adams (Martin), Bella Balsamo (Parsons), Eleanor Conniff (Messenger, Gladys), Grant Fletcher (Prewitt) and their castmates don’t give it their all, but it’s not until the production turns pitch-black post intermission that 1984 at long last hits the right tonal notes, and when it does, its final act is a dozzy.

1984’s biggest calling card, aside from Gantvoort’s dynamic, dramatic star turn is Cistone’s remarkable modular set design, multisided grey towers that mutate into one stark locale after another, and the instruments of torture Cistone has designed are horrifying as all get-out. (So is Ned Mochel’s power-punching fight choreography.)

 Cistone’s sound and lighting designs are stunners too, and his costumes effectively evoke the uniformity of Orwell’s 1984, save one retro frock that seems too freshly made to be believable.

1984 is produced by Cistone, Snellman, and Ronnie Marmo and features the prerecorded talents of Mel Rodriguez, Katie Zeiner, and Morris Schorr.

 I very much enjoyed Robo & Bash’s unexpectedly comedic spin on Patrick Hamilton’s Rope back in 2018, and was hoping lightning would strike twice with 1984. Though it didn’t, the company’s latest is not without its selling points. There just aren’t enough of them.

Theatre 68, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Through April 19. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 7:00. Also Saturday April 19 at 2:30.
www.theatre68.com

–Steven Stanley
April 4, 2025
Photos: Endlens.com

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Tags: George Orwell, Robert Owens, Robo & Bash Productions, Theatre 68, William A. Miles Jr., Wilton E. Hall Jr.