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NEW YORK - A scary, unspoken and all too familiar question grips the audience in the opening seconds of one of the new one-act plays in the Ensemble Studio Theater's Marathon series: Just how bad is this going to be?
There's a blue-collar lug in a T-shirt staring blankly out a window; there's the shrill little wife clamoring for attention. Oh, please. Didn't this kind of thing go out in the 1950s?
Then expectations take a sharp turn. The characters are repeating themselves too literally and too often for us to be meant to take them seriously. Still, didn't send-ups of 1950s kitchen-sink dramas go out in the 1970s? But hold on: this sketch seems to be about people tripping, comically and self-consciously, over their native tongue. Still, didn't David Ives already do that in ``All in the Timing''?
It is to the great credit of a new playwright named Peter Basch that he raises and blows away all these reservations within the first few minutes of ``English (It's Where the Words Are).'' Directed with subversive stealth by Susann Brinkley, ``English'' demonstrates that, even in an age of parodies of parodies and imitations of imitations, there's always room for one more turn of the screw from a playwright of original wit.
Within the time it takes to grill a hamburger (rare), Basch manages to take on the limitations of words, the conventions of several genres of literature and the self-consciousness of a world choking on its own cultural references.
As the restlessly married Joey and Suzy (played with tasty understatement by Joseph Lyle Taylor and Stephanie Cannon) address what they describe as their ``ill-defined yearnings,'' they run through a thesaurus of possibilities that encompasses words like ``putrescence'' and, most memorably, ``credenza.'' Joey may be what he calls ``maleducated,'' but he and his wife are as articulately inarticulate as a couple get.
One choice example: Suzy observes irritably (and correctly): ``We're just sort of talking aimlessly, repeating ourselves like cretins. We need higher stakes.'' Like what? ``Like a firearm,'' she says, suddenly displaying one. The lights change; the mood changes; the tempo changes. But just long enough for Suzy to segue into ``my revealing personal reminiscence,'' which upends a whole other dramatic staple with equal dispatch.
Basch has a quicksilver command of comic tone that seems purely theatrical. His program biography, alas, states that he is living in Los Angeles, ``learning how to write screenplays and sitcoms.''
Speaking of breadth of style, Romulus Linney is also represented here. In terms of scope of ambition, Linney may be our bravest living playwright, running from rural dramas about hillbilly homicides to lush meditations on Lord Byron's ghost and Frederick the Great. Now he has written and directed a short-hand adaptation of nothing less than ``La Princesse de Cleves,'' Mme. de La Fayette's great 17th-century novel about a love that kills.
Entitled ``Love Like Fire (Part I),'' the work combines a clinical sense of pathological passion with some exceedingly overripe prose. Linney is good at spotlighting, in theatrical ways, La Fayette's psychological symbols.
But to succeed ``Love'' needs an even more formally stylized presentation than it has been given. The tone still feels shaky. The play does allow a young actress named Melinda Page Hamilton to glow with truly regal self-possession as the princess. The fact that she resembles the young Grace Kelly doesn't hurt.
The evening is rounded off by Stuart R. Brown's ``Slice of Life,'' a gentle, carefully shaped and slightly Saroyanish encounter between two men in a diner, nicely directed (by Pirie MacDonald) and acted (by Richmond Hoxie and Paul Austin). And Will Scheffer's ``Bel Canto,'' directed by Brian Mertes, finds three women psychologically duking it out during a thunderstorm at a New Jersey beach.
As played by Phyllis Somerville, Fiona Gallagher and, especially, Elizabeth Berridge, Scheffer's blue-collar Jersey girls (Bruce Springsteen songs figure in the script) are a lively, salty-mouthed lot.
But they find themselves wrestling with ungainly and earnest metaphors about the tunnel of love and hula dancing. Putting ``Bel Canto'' right next to Basch's metaphor-skewering play is not an instance of tactful planning.
The 19th annual festival of new one-act plays.
Jamie Richards, executive producer; Mark Roberts, marathon producer; Charles Gale, associate producer; John Spears, production manager. Lighting by Greg MacPherson; sets by Mark Symczak; costumes by Andy Wallach; sound by Jeffrey Taylor; props master, Lisa Dent. Presented by the Ensemble Studio Theater, Curt Dempster, artistic director; Susan Jones, managing director. At 549 West 52nd St.
SLICE OF LIFE - By Stuart R. Brown; directed by Pirie MacDonald. With Richmond Hoxie (C.C.) and Paul Austin (Earl).
ENGLISH (IT'S WHERE THE WORDS ARE) - By Peter Basch; directed by Susann Brinkley. WITH: Joseph Lyle Taylor (Joey) and Stephanie Cannon (Suzy).
BEL CANTO – By Will Scheffer; directed by Brian Mertes. WITH: Phyllis Somerville (Ma), Elizabeth Berridge (Phil) and Fiona Gallagher (Vinnie).
LOVE LIKE FIRE (PART I) – Written and directed by Romulus Linney. WITH: John-Martin Green (Chamberlain), Chris Ceraso (King), Thomas Schall (Duke), Melinda Page Hamilton (Princess) and Bill Cwikowski (Prince).
Copyright 1996 The New York Times
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