With iPhone in hand, he engages his mistress in sex-tape foreplay as she alternately resists and resigns. The boy re-actively confesses his affection for our heroin-filled-heroine and begs his mother’s lover for a taste of the “spoonful of sugar and spoonful of dirt” she brags “hooks them every time.” “I’m yours ‘til morning” she replies, and off into the storm-clouded sunset they stumble.Ĭut to Act II and in a seedy motel room a stripped-down, modern-day Joe (Rodney Eastman) straddles lingerie-clad hooker Alex (playwright Jillian Leigh). The child and prostitute spend the next 20 minutes discussing junkies, art and the moon, as well as Joe’s quaint recollections of Kim’s sexual conquests (“remember that guy who wanted you to eat his ass…”) before Kim tells little Joe of his mother’s desire to abandon him. Sporting laced-leggings, a denim miniskirt and a shiner on her forehead to compliment her smudged mascara, Kim is Joe’s mother’s strung-out girlfriend who regularly exchanges sex for survival.

In blows Kim (the British-tongued Sasha Higgins) - or “Mac” as she’s sometimes referred - to escape the turbulence outside. Fourteen-year-old Joe (Seth Lee) is alone in the dingy apartment in which he and his negligent mother squat.

It’s 1988 in Lower Manhattan during the Tompkins Square Park Riots.

Unfortunately, two-dimensional characters, a paper-thin plot and minimal production design are likely to leave audiences of Hooked. Jillian Leigh’s Hooked, now receiving its World Premiere as part of the inaugural season of the Los Angeles Theater Festival, offers many ingredients that can make for a compelling, if gritty and disturbing, evening of theater - prostitution, violence and cyclical sexual abuse.

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