RAGGED DICK
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It’s clear from the start that playwright Neal Bell desperately wants Ragged Dick to be a deep play, an important play. But it is also clear that his desperation prevents him from achieving that. Ragged Dick is so filled with “deep meaning” and portent–poetic monologues, brooding conversations, characters who are also symbols–that the story and even the intent of the play become murky.
Which is a shame, because the play is set in an auspicious and dramatic time and place in American history–New York City in 1890–where the combined factors of unregulated industrial growth, corrupt political machines, and wave after wave of European immigrants had created vast, fetid slums. At the same time a new kind of journalist emerged, writing for the lurid tabloids published by the likes of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer to satisfy an audience hungry for tales of sex, scandal, and urban violence. These “yellow journalists” combed the slums for the next sordid story to splash across the front page, but many of them–including Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, and Stephen Crane–hoped to use the newspapers to draw attention to the problems of the urban poor.
Credit for the play making any sense at all belongs to Jeff Ginsberg, whose direction is much better focused than the script, and to the actors, whose heroic efforts keep a play full of improbable dialogue and motivationless action moving.
