Long before Francis Gercke’s first produced play, “The October Night of Johnny Zero,” begins, the audience gets a visceral taste of what’s to come. The world premiere play that opened Saturday at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center in East Village is set in a crumbling home deluged with rain, thunder and buzzy, flickering electricity the audience sees and hears as they arrive.
Gercke has a talent for easy-flowing, natural, descriptive and witty dialogue, and he doesn’t go overboard with plot exposition in the play, which runs two hours with intermission. But the first act gets bogged down with unnecessary dialogue and could easily be trimmed by 15 to 20 minutes. In fact, if the play was an intermissionless 90 minutes, it would be a more thrilling theatrical ride.
Barbara and Franky have secrets that are eating away at their lives, relationship and house like blistering acid. A year earlier, Franky’s older brother Donny disappeared, and Johnny — whose school nickname is “Double Zero” — is the same age Donny would be if he were still around. Johnny is hiding his own secrets about why he left his last high school, family problems and the rage he tries to conceal under a gentle demeanor.