ZEBRA!

A little hunk of New York City has just materialised at the Wharf 1 Theatre. It's a midtown Irish bar called the Big House that's seen better days, with Guinness on tap, an ancient jukebox in the corner and a lifetime's accumulation of artefacts on the wall: a mounted wolf's head, a few NBA jerseys under glass, a framed picture of John F. Kennedy and droopy Christmas tinsel still up though the party is long over.

You get the feeling that, in a lot of different ways, the party is over for these three characters too. There's the straight-talkin' owner of the joint (Nadine Garner) - who's keeping her name to herself as if it's all she's got. There's Jimmy (Bryan Brown), the Australian real estate entrepreneur who stumbles in bleeding and claims he's been a car accident. And there's Larry (Colin Friels), a dapper American gent with his arm in a sling, claiming he was in a skiing accident. Larry pours himself a whiskey behind the unattended bar and fires up Springsteen's rollicking anthem of disillusionment on the jukebox: "Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack / I went out for a ride and I never went back". Outside, it's snowing.

The real star of the show is the mise-en-scène. Set designer David McKay, who works for the screen rather than the stage, brings a staggering amount of detail to the stage. When a police car passes outside - a fleeting display of collaborative brilliance from sound designer Paul Charlier and lighting designer Damien Cooper - you can really believe, for a moment, that you're deep in the belly of NYC with 46th Street buzzing outside.

With so much to be dazzled by - the shazam production values, the Boss rocking away on the soundtrack, the mere presence of those powerhouse actors - it can be tricky to work out why, ultimately, ZEBRA! is underwhelming. But let's give it a red hot go.

As an ideas piece, ZEBRA! is fascinating and peppered with genuine insight - a parable ripped right from the soul of post-GFC America at a significant time and place in history. But somehow and somewhere on the long road to the theatre, the sharpness and spikiness of Ross Mueller's dialogue has been ironed, flattened out. It's a jokey, wisecracking script - but we identify most of the gags rather than laugh at them. It almost seems the humour has been coaxed out of the performers' delivery in the concerted push for naturalism.

If the humour was the first thing to go, the connection with the characters was second. We feel some sympathy for the beleaguered Jimmy appealing to Larry, but too much of the drama of ZEBRA! has happened somewhere else some other time, and there's not an awful lot to stir our emotions here and now. A little less conversation, a little more action would have been nice - or, to put it another way, less braying and stamping of hooves, more actual galloping. It's meant to be daft when (spoiler alert, sort of) Larry lets out his cry of "I am ZEBRA!" and charges Jimmy - but one would normally expect a moment of physical contact like this to at least get one's blood pumping. It doesn't.

Structurally, the thing feels like it's about to tip over. The story treads water for about forty minutes before arriving at a crucial plot point - by which stage it doesn't have the punch that it should. It's not enough that we're sort of, kinda interested in the dynamic between these characters. We simply don't get the feeling there's much at stake, and for too much of the time we're wondering why we're watching Jimmy, Larry and Whatsherface at all.

Which brings us back to that set. Yes, it's exquisite - and those hardwood timbers are a thing of beauty. But, in a way, it traps its actors more distinctly (and more to the play's detriment) than Simon Stone's glass tank in The Wild Duck­ - stuck in a beautiful photograph with not that much going on for an hour and 45 minutes. Darryn King

Preview:

The idea for ZEBRA! was born, Ross Mueller says, on a freezing January evening in New York in 2009. With Obama's inauguration on the way, there was hope that the political climate would change, but the Global Financial Crisis was still hitting families hard, and there was a lot of general uncertainty in the economy and the future.

Mueller was watching American football in a downtown Irish pub when he was joined by a couple of fifty-something locals. He wasn't expecting what happened next. "One of them went to the bathroom and the other one came out and just told me this sort of confronting life story in the time that his friend was in the bathroom," Mueller says. "This guy had found out that he had lost everything a couple of weeks ago. He hadn't been able to figure out what he was going to do with his real estate. ‘And,' he said, ‘the worst thing is that I'm married to this guy's daughter and she thinks that she's married this ‘future'.' And then this other guy came back to the bathroom and sat down and we didn't say another word about it and we just talked about football."

It made a huge impact on Mueller. That night, in his derelict studio space, Mueller began outlining what would become ZEBRA! "It was snowing outside, so nobody was moving in or out, and I spent three days and three nights constructing this idea and writing a draft. I don't think I could have written this play without being in America - I couldn't have written this play without being in that space because I think that compression of experience allowed me to be solely concentrated on what this play could be."

It wasn't long before Mueller was ready to send his treatment to Sydney Theatre Company's literary manager Polly Rowe. The pair had previously collaborated on his play Concussion, which played in the Wharf 2 theatre in 2009, and Rowe played a vital role in the whole writing process. "My role is to support Ross first and foremost and be an in-between for him and the director and the company as well, and be there to sometimes point out things that he can't see because he's too close to it," she says. "I'm just there for Ross to bounce off ideas. He would show me a few pages or call me to talk about an idea and I'd give him pages of notes. It's been quite constant - we've probably talked every week for the past six months." Asked about his collaboration with Rowe, Mueller comments: "It's kind of like an engineer and an architect. But it's also about that joint vision of sharing that you both want to build this building together."

After two years of development, ZEBRA! is unleashed this month, with Bryan Brown and Colin Friels conveying something of the human experience of being caught in economic turmoil. "The bottom line is: one guy needs to save his future and the other guy's trying to protect his past... It's about love and money."

Rowe chimes in: "I think that what's really important and relevant about the play now is that it's about who we are. That's quite an important question. What has the GFC done to our self-esteem? And what's the lasting damage of that? And you can see it in these two men - one that has kind of worked it out and one that kind of hasn't. It's going to change your identity and it has changed people's identities in America and in Australia. The play is a contemplation of that." Nathalie Jones