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A BODY OF WATER
Like water for molasses
By Jenna Scherer
del.ico.us
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Every playwright needs to work his muscles now and again, but that doesn't mean we should have to pay to watch his calisthenics. With A Body of Water, now onstage at the Charlestown Working Theater, Lee Blessing seems to have let a writing exercise unwittingly stumble into a full production.
Though Blessing nabbed Pulitzer and Tony nominations for 1986's A Walk in the Woods, his latest leaves me listless and drowning in the play's eponymous lake. I really couldn't say what the theater gods were smoking when A Body of Water won the 2006 Steinberg New Play Award. Maybe lazy stagecraft got sexy all of a sudden.
Still, given a decent production, Blessing's amorphous clunker might come off slightly better than expected. But Molasses Tank's production is far from decent. With stiff staging by Rob Bettencourt and an uneven three-person cast, it might be better titled Robots in Captivity.
A Body of Water operates on a very simple conceit: a man and a woman (Anthony Dangerfield and Elizabeth Brunette) wake up one morning with no memories. They're in a posh vacation house surrounded on all sides by—you guessed it—a body of water. They wander the living room in matching plaid bathrobes, searching for something familiar. They even check each other's genitalia for recognizable markings ('cause, you know, even if you don't recognize a guy's face, you'll definitely recognize his dick).
Enter the enigmatic Wren (Judith Kalaora), decked out in athletic gear, toting bagels and bottled information. She reveals very little at first, apart from the fact that the two have new-agey names—Moss and Avis—of their very own.
Wren tells the hapless pair that they wake up every morning with slates wiped clean. She feeds them a garden variety of scenarios, depending on her mood—they're murderers, she's their lawyer, they're brainsick, she's their daughter, they're dead, she's ... just chilling, etc.
This sort of ambiguous setting has been evoked by the likes of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter with far more grace and menace. Vladimir and Estragon posed actual interesting questions—Moss and Avis just whine a lot. I kept vaguely hoping Wren would whip out a gun and put the buggers out of their boring, boring misery.
It makes it even harder to care about the duo's plight when the actors playing them are both terribly awkward. At first, I thought Brunette's propensity to tense all of her muscles and shout her lines in a grating monotone was some sort of acting choice. It soon became apparent that this was par for the course. I'm all for good diction, but Brunette overenunciates to distraction (e.g. "WhaT righT way is there To Take iT?").
Dangerfield matches her discomfort with his limp turn as Moss. Our hero slumps around the stage, trailing his arms like a pair of sausages that got sewn onto his torso when he wasn't looking. Though Blessing paints Moss as a horny fellow, hitting up Avis for sex at every available juncture, Dangerfield seems about as turned on as a bit of overdone ziti.
My heart goes out to Kalaora, who imbues Wren with an honest-to-god range of human emotion. We feel every ounce of her frustration, her intermingled love and hate for her bewildered charges. Yet given her fellow actors, Kalaora may as well be pouring her pain into a couple of vaguely desolate stones.
As a director, Bettencourt drops the ball from the word go. The pace moves as glacially as Moss and Avis' ability to grasp simple concepts. He lets his actors gaze wanly into the audience and languish in armchairs for long stretches; lengthy blackouts between scenes feature tinny, MIDI-quality instrumentals.
This waste of a performance wouldn't be nearly as disappointing if I didn't know that Molasses Tank is capable of so much better. Last year's The Conquest of the South Pole and 2006's Almost Asleep represented Boston fringe theater at its finest. Both were dynamic stagings of truly challenging plays. But company Artistic Director Steve Rotolo helmed those productions; I can only squinch up my eyes and pray that he'll take back the reins next time around.
Blessing cuts off A Body of Water at a seemingly arbitrary point, leaving us with no new insights into the nature of human recollection. My hope for you, o' playgoer, is that you leave the theater with the same gift given daily to Moss and Avis—no memory of what you've just witnessed.
A BODY OF WATER
THROUGH 2.9.08
MOLASSES TANK PRODUCTIONS AT CHARLESTOWN WORKING THEATER
442 BUNKER HILL RD., CHARLESTOWN
866.811.4111
THU-SAT 8PM
$18; $15 STUDENTS/SENIORS
CHARLESTOWNWORKINGTHEATER.ORG
MOLASSESTANK.ORG
