Review: Hotel Morocco by Echo Productions
by Michael Meigs

Aaron Black's Hotel Morocco has lots of ambiance and some tough, snarling dialogue. Talk about atmosphere -- he has taken the 50s noir setting of a New York fleabag hotel, populated it with dumbasses, women looking for bad sex, gangsters, a demented ancient resident and one would-be writer on his way down. The writer, carrying the Everyman label of Adam, lost his previous job in a better hotel and is in deep, limp depression over his father's death. To cap it all, he has writer's block.

Black ladles it out. These people are are all corporality, crassness, crime and copulation. The actors, several of whom were with Black in City's Hamlet, have a good time with this nasty dialogue and they deliver it well. Director Shannon Davis, who played Ophelia to Black's Hamlet,  keeps the action moving around the stage,  in the hope that it will go somewhere.

 

Omid Ghorashi as the dim-witted assistant manager is especially convincing as a sort of reject from The Sopranos, and normally clean-cut Scot Friedman is the unexplained eastern European crime boss who owns the place. Pascal Nicolas is the fellow bellhop, obsessed with women but handy with a baseball bat when hooligans hit the hotel.

 

The story, such as it is, features Adam's increasing disillusionment and his reluctant relationship with Rocco the messy, stinking old Alzheimer's patient stubbornly holding onto his one-room residential lease on the third floor. John McNeill, a fine character actor, is perfectly convincing as that heap of messy delusional humanity, even if we never do figure out if there's a back story there or not. 

 

 

Karen Alvarado is the straight-talking former girlfriend who just can't get through to Adam and Suzanne Balling is the end-of-her-rope housewife out to get laid by any man who can get it up (Adam passes on that opportunity). 

 

The playwright raises these stereotypes somewhat above the level of stereotypes, with the help of his actors, but he doesn't really resolve the plot line. He doesn't choose the absolute worst of plot devices ("it was all a dream!") but he gets close, by recruiting an angel to provide our Adam some counseling. 

Oh, please -- there are so many other directions he might have gone with these elements. Instead, one imagines Black as Adam sitting in the cleaning closet with a sheaf of scribbled pages, wondering how the hell to get out of the mess he has concocted.

 

Comments by anonymous A-Team member at "Go.See.Do" blog of NowPlayingAustin.com, January 27

EXTRA

Click to view program for Hotel Morocco by Aaron Black, Echo Productions (.pdf file, 2.9 MB)

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Hotel Morocco
by Aaron Black
Echo Productions

presented at the FronteraFest long fringe festival