Just add acting

Deux Filles buoys up The Water Children

by Carolyn Clay

THE WATER CHILDREN, By Wendy MacLeod. Directed by David Sinaiko. Set design by Emily Dunn. Costumes by Liza Hope. Lighting by Sarah Eisel and David Sinaiko. With Sarah Newhouse, Deanna Dunmyer, Beno Chapman, Peter E. Haydu, Juan Luis Acevedo, John Michael Gilbert, and Georgia Lyman. Presented by Deux Filles at the Beau Jest Moving Theater through October 24.

The Water Children is sodden with improbability, but that doesn't keep Deux Filles from wringing nice performances out of it. Wendy MacLeod's play is an Amblin Entertainment/DreamWorks commission from Playwrights' Horizons. And nothing Amblin/DreamWorks honcho Steven Spielberg has come up with -- including extraterrestrial cuties who need to phone home -- seems more unlikely than its confluence of events: a left-leaning actress, frightened by aging, agrees to appear in a heart-tugging commercial for a pro-life organization and, while dodging lunatic bullets from the right and strident tirades from the left, falls for the unctuous head of the pro-lifers and gets all swoony about having his baby. You can't say the piece isn't interesting, though. And it provides apt performance opportunities for the "deux filles" -- actresses Deanna Dunmyer and Sarah Newhouse, who are behind this Actors Equity Members Project Code production.

Dunmyer plays Megan, the attractive blonde New York actress who suddenly finds herself losing parts to younger attractive blonde thespians and is reduced to taking the anti-abortion gig for the money. Apparently, the job awakens latent regret for an abortion she had at 16 -- I say latent since, in the first scene, Megan seems to have no qualms about her long-ago choice. But once in the clutches of wine-swirling, shoulder-pressing, incredibly smooth pro-lifer Randall (whose organization, Life Force, is producing the commercial), Megan gets all fuzzy about both her aborted child and her principles. (The unborn baby, grown to affable young-manhood, shows up regularly in the play, which takes its name from a Buddhist concept regarding the souls of the unborn, who are not murdered, à la the pro-life perspective, but "returned" to be relaunched at a more auspicious time.)

Certainly The Water Children is a provocative effort; it goes mano-a-mano against a controversial subject without demonizing either side (in fact, it has some fun with their demonization of each other). But this is political theater as conceived not by Brecht but by Jackie Collins. And despite the play's being set in New York and its allegations that Megan has played the great roles (including Medea!), The Water Children has more of an LA than a New York sensibility. Randall is a regular Michael Douglas of a pro-life honcho, and 36-year-old Megan's concerns about aging seem more apropos to film than to theater. Moreover, MacLeod overloads the hour-and-45-minute play. I had enough trouble accepting the romance between the liberal actress and the lounge-lizard Pat Buchanan (who somehow rose from a West Virginia background to become, in his own words, "a cracker in Armani") without also having to swallow the pro-life administrator's failure to do something about the loose-cannon volunteer who makes it quite clear that he has guns and is insane.

But to the production: it's small-scale and, under David Sinaiko's direction, well acted. The Meg Ryan-esque Dunmyer compels you to buy the conflicted Megan as a complex, confused, and yearning person. And she has a laugh that's irresistible -- a loud, earthy cackle usually directed at right-wing "wooer" Randall. Newhouse plays Megan's inexplicably English-accented agent, her tough-as-nails lesbian roommate Liz (who gets all the best lines), and her loving if slatternly Ohio mom, both in flashback and in the present. She distinguishes the characters nicely and brings real bristle to Liz. Peter E. Haydu is charged with the most difficult acting challenge: Randall, whose hillbilly origins just don't jive with his slinky persona. But Haydu does make Randall seductive, which is the point.

There are admirable turns, too, by Beno Chapman in the impossible role of the unborn child, who catalogues all the things he never did (such as playing baseball and making ashtrays), and by Juan Luis Acevedo as a humorous Hispanic hairdresser and a prima-donna commercial director. John Michael Gilbert is dynamic as the crazed anti-abortion volunteer, but his intensity contributes to the play's implausibility: no way Randall would consider this guy a minor problem. And Georgia Lyman (whom, I admit, I have known since she was born) manages to be both hilarious and convincing as a loping cracker teen who truly believes she is an aborted fetus rescued from a pail. The Water Children may be hard to buy, but Deux Filles gives it a good sell.