Dead End | Griffin Theatre Company
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The “dead end” is a street along New York’s East River, where posh apartments butt up against waterfront slums. Here a pack of street kids loiters, pitching pennies, playing cards, swimming in the polluted river, and bullying weaker children. The group’s alpha male, Tommy, fends off challenges from his rival, Spit, so named because of his habit of spitting in people’s faces. The other boys are Angel, Dippy, the tubercular TB, and the new “Jew kid,” Milty. The boys cling together for protection and companionship, but internal friction and external pressures threaten to turn them against one another in a world where three cents is cause for a fight and straying onto the wrong turf is reason for war.
The original Broadway staging of this sprawling work was famous for its large cast–some 45 actors, including 6 youngsters who went on to appear in the 1937 film version and a subsequent series of movies featuring the Dead End Kids (later the Bowery Boys). Most professional theaters today would find the play prohibitively expensive to produce, but non-Equity Griffin has tackled the project with impressive success under Jonathan Berry’s direction. The 27-person ensemble is headed by John Dixon, Russell Armstrong, Charles Filipov, Dan Foster, Joe Goldhammer, and Steve Gensler as the gang; they capture both the engaging exuberance and desperate dangerousness of these career criminals in the making. Dylan Lower and Cora Vander Broek achingly embody the potential of Gimpty and Drina’s romance, which gives the play its tentative hopeful ending.
