Spring is here, but darkness still reigns at the Boston Center for the Arts, which is now housing two productions obsessed with mortality (just after the close of the Theater Offensive’s apocalyptic Oklahoma City). Company One’s Triptych, comprising three short works by Samuel Beckett, is reasonably well staged in the suitably wretched Leland Center (through March 31). The Bridge Theatre Company is not as successful with Boston playwright Ted Richer’s Figurations (through March 24), a series of 18 pieces loosely tied together by “one character’s vision of life, love, and death.”

Company One boasts that all of its board members are under 30 (has it considered staging Logan’s Run?), but this Beckett program, directed by Raymond Munro, should cause anyone to reflect on how easy it is to squander a lifetime. In the 1958 Krapp’s Last Tape, an elderly man (Neil Schroeder) listens to his own voice — a tape recording, made on his 39th birthday, in which he describes his mother’s death and a seemingly pointless break-up with a lover. Outwardly at least, Krapp is as pathetic as his name suggests, sitting in filthy clothes (with an unpeeled banana stuffed in one pocket) and frequently shambling off stage to fortify himself with alcohol (if the sound effects are any indication). Schroeder first grabs your attention with fussy mannerisms, but he fleshes out the script with reactions to his character’s musings from decades before. His impatience is both curmudgeonly and childlike, an effect that reinforces the image of life as a tape loop. In one memorable bit, the recorded Krapp resolves to drink less and the older and younger versions of the character share a good laugh at this impossible idea. It’s delightful to see Krapp in a moment of joy — and depressing to realize that all his remaining bits of pleasure are likely to be as inane and solitary.

Footfalls, first performed in 1976, shows a 40ish woman named May (Virginia Penta) pacing in near-darkness and talking to her invalid mother (the off-stage voice of Sally Earle) in another room. May has not been out of the house “since girlhood,” the mother explains to the audience in a voice of wonder and regret. Wrapped in sweaters and robes and bathed in a green light, Penta looks like a rancid wedding cake, and her distant manner is indeed unnerving. The final play, the 1981 Ohio Impromptu, is a brief scene in which one old man (Schroeder again) reads aloud to someone who could be his twin (Munro). It’s a suitably enigmatic way to end the evening.

But Beckett has nothing on Ted Richer in terms of minimalist language. Until the Bridge Theatre Company came along, his Figurations — musings on skin cancer, loveless sex, and the solitude of a writer’s life, among other things — had been performed only on British radio. So are we being asked to spend an evening on uncomfortable chairs in the BCA because radio drama is all but nonexistent in the United States? Director Maggie Dietz tries to hold our interest with a multi-level set and an elegant use of shadows, but I often wondered whether Figurations would have more impact if I dozed off and let Richer’s words infiltrate my dreams.

Most of the pieces involve actors pantomiming the words of a narrator standing elsewhere on stage, and this can be distracting rather than illuminating. When a man visits a fortune teller, the narrator keeps repeating the line “She lifted, then lowered the shroud.” My reaction was that she seemed to be lifting a veil, not a shroud, and that her arms seemed to be getting tired. The hunched-over landlady of a rooming house who repeatedly cries “My husband died on my wedding night!” is similarly more disturbing to the ear than to the eye. Listening to the radio, one might find it unsettling not to know whether a phrase or action is going to be repeated. Here you see the actors get ready, and you know that you’re in for it all over again. The fortune teller’s prediction — “You will live a long life and die young” — doesn’t seem so cryptic when one is wondering how 90 minutes in the theater can creep by so slowly.

The five actors in multiple roles are clearly not meant to be the attractions of the evening — they don’t even get to post their head shots in the theater lobby. Erin Bell, Peter Brown, Kim Crocker, and Todd Hearon are capable readers and striking in appearance, but these qualities don’t much connect with each other in this production. Only Jeff Peterson comes across with fully realized characters, though he might be regarded as hammy by anyone who feels Richer’s words are enough to carry the show. Both of Peterson’s standout scenes are fueled by bitterness toward lovers; one involves infidelity, the other has him banging out a “fairy tale” on his laptop about “a princess who wanted everything” and “wound up with nothing.” Richer’s protagonist is not very attractive in these scenes, but he is recognizably human. And any moment of passion, however misdirected, was a Godsend at the BCA last weekend.

Issue Date: March 22-29, 2001