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Hearts of darkness
Carol Mulroney, True West, Lord of the Flies
BY CAROLYN CLAY

There is a hollow in Carol Mulroney — and in Carol Mulroney, Stephen Belber’s play about the grown-up little girl lost of the title. In its world premiere, courtesy of the Huntington Theatre Company at the Wimberly Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA (through November 20), the play floats magically in its space atop "the shock of the city and the traffic." It sports some arresting arias, sometimes startles with non sequitur, comes neatly full circle, and is very nicely acted under Lisa Peterson’s direction. But Belber seems to have whittled away at his 90-minute play without ever arriving at a core. Carol is possessed of a sadness that no one — not her successful salesman father or his two minions, to one of whom she is married — can "pitch" her out of. The sadness is a river that rolls back to childhood and is about to push her over a precipice. And there are other tributaries of marital discontent and infidelity. But there’s nothing to get to the bottom of in this roundabout exploration of a tragic event in which impulse and destiny combine in a curious spew of Molly-Bloom-embraces-the-Reaper affirmation.

The play is set on the roof of an urban apartment building, where Carol prefers to spend her time, viewing life from a flattering distance and contemplating her potential to jump. She’d like to take E.M. Forster up on his admonition to "only connect," but she feels out of "alignment" with a cosmetics-marketing bulldozer of a father who believes in the power of positive rethinking, a husband whose struggle toward authenticity includes plans to keep bees and cultivate potatoes on the roof, and a boozy best friend who’s got more good lines than good intentions. Yet what the angst is all about we never really do find out — despite repeated flashbacks to another aerie, the anus of a six-story elephant (apparently an Atlantic City landmark) where Carol and her father, Hudson, rehash variations on the same scene, which seems to hinge on his poor caretaking of the mother Carol has recently learned committed suicide, leaving a one-word answer to Hudson’s mantra that "all you have to do is say yes."

Belber culls laughs from arbitrariness, as when Hudson abruptly informs his African-American employee, Ken, that he wants him to marry the already married Carol. He can write elegantly too, though not all of the writing sounds like talk. There are brisk conversational volleys among characters who are for the most part sincere if confused, and no one will soon forget the self-loathing ode to oneness with the universe that takes the form of "cunt spores" wafting out to sea to be ingested by a Turkish sailor named Gobby. Belber’s notion of salesmanship — in a sense, everyone in the play is trying to sell Carol a plan — applied to a life embrace is worthy but underdeveloped. And his structure — presenting a shattering event, then going backward to wind up to it — has a pristine appeal but is awkwardly slammed into place, with people alluding awkwardly to the time. Gearing up to laud cosmetics over a late-night drink with Ken, Hudson remarks, "It’s Friday night, it’s 11 o’clock and I’m gonna tell you why I love it." Not even as terrific an actor as Larry Pine can make that sound natural.

But Carol Mulroney is being given a first-rate first plunge. Alexander V. Nichols puts on a captivating light show behind Carol’s barren rooftop refuge, the stars turning red and gold and shimmering like baubles on strings. And the actors suck all the comedy, sorrow, and misdirected drive they can from the material. Ana Reeder is a compellingly childlike Carol, though not without savvy. Pine makes Hutton so personable, you can understand why he buys his own spiel. Johanna Day’s Joan burns with yearning beneath her sardonic veneer. And Reuben Jackson, as control-loving Ken, and Tim Ransom, as Carol’s spirituality-seeking husband, Lesley, convince despite thin characterizations. Carol Mulroney has good bones, and the Huntington has daubed her effectively with what cosmetics king Hudson calls "the face we put on to face the folly." But this play’s as skinny as Kate Moss.

In Sam Shepard’s 1980 True West (at New Repertory Theatre through November 20), it’s not sadness but identity that’s free-floating (along with, eventually, the smell of toast). Shepard’s significant comedy about two brothers — one an Ivy-League-educated screenwriter, the other a petty thief and all-around hombre — is justifiably popular; a 2000 Broadway revival starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternating roles. The play lacks the mystery of Shepard’s Pulitzer-winning Buried Child or the mournful mythos of his A Lie of the Mind. But its tense California-kitchen-set power struggle has the appeal of sit-com combined with primal themes about familial disintegration and the loss of the American West. Then there’s the irresistible folly involving myriad hot toasters going about their business, here brought to a deft close by one swift karate chop to the bottom of a plate.

Austin, holed up in his absent mother’s tacky LA home while he tries to hustle a film script, is the less edgy of two siblings. As the play opens, his worst nightmare, big brother Lee, has rolled out of the desert hoping to pull off a few heists before slinking back to the lonely Mojave. In Robert Walsh’s well-cast, carefully choreographed production, we first see the industrious if wimpy Austin in light, the brooding Lee in darkness — a set-up that will reverse as Lee encroaches on Austin’s professional territory, his brother starts to yearn for the landmarks of childhood and the hardscrabble freedoms of the authentic West, and the pair’s identities melt into a tragicomic pool of wreckage and violence.

Robert Walsh, who helms the production, is also a fight director, and that makes him an apt choice for this assignment. His combatants likewise rise to the occasion, with Todd Alan Johnson an imposing, explosive Lee and John Kuntz a simmering, finally enraged Austin. The production ignores Shepard’s instruction to open up to "a vast desert-like landscape" at the end; the coup de théâtre is missed, but the hunkering actors make its point. And on the way, both are as hilarious as Lee is frightening and Austin frustrated. Johnson’s Lee is a cocky showman of a loser who, though he may never have heard of irony, can bare his teeth and wrinkle his nose in the perfect, sardonic touché. And the moment in which Kuntz’s drunk and disheveled Austin turns on a TV by careering into it full tilt is typical of the production’s controlled bravado.

It’s "Survivor: William Golding" at the venerable Wheelock Family Theatre, which opens its 25th-anniversary season with Nigel Williamson’s stage adaptation of Lord of the Flies (through November 20). The troupe has always ameliorated its King and I and Cinderella with Our Town and other serious works. But Lord of the Flies, a Peter Pan gone terribly wrong, is particularly gutsy. Golding’s 1954 novel about British schoolboys turning savage on a tropical island has been filmed twice but proves difficult to stage. Williamson’s telescoping of the book is a jumble, and so is Susan Kosoff’s staging on what look like colliding wood-planked skateboard ramps behind a beachfront of black sand. As the boys divide into factions, juxtaposed scenes are staged right in the middle of each other, and the action — long on Stomp-like percussion and chants of "Kill the pig! Spill its blood!" — can be confusing.

The acting, however, by a young company of mostly Wheelock veterans, is urgent and sound — right down to the British accents, which include a lower-class one for Jacob Brandt’s earnest fussbudget of a Piggy. There is some perhaps inevitable overacting, but not much. And the company is as committed to the material as it is agile at negotiating the dips and precipices of Danila Korogodsky’s set. These teen performers both get and put across the message that there’s nothing scarier than us.


Issue Date: November 4 - 10, 2005
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