Jun 13, 2008

One-acts' skewed realities delight

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

It's one of the better summer theater deals in the Peninsula and South Bay, and for some reason is still something of a secret. That would be the repertory shows produced in June and July in Sunnyvale by the California Theatre Center.

During the rest of the year, this group concentrates on an elaborate program of theater directed toward youth. In the summer they stage an adult season that contains quality work.

This summer's offering begins with an evening of two one-acts. The anchor piece is a wonderful Monty Python-esque English comedy called "The Dock Brief," written more than 50 years ago by John Mortimer, an English lawyer best known as the author of the "Rumpole of the Bailey" fiction pieces and television series.

I saw "The Dock Brief" performed in Oxford, England, many years ago when I was 12 years old. Its touching quirkiness made an impression that has stayed with me ever since.
"The Dock Brief" is set in a London jail cell in the 1950s. Here an over-the-hill public defender finds himself assigned to defend a man who has killed his wife, readily admits it, and doesn't care what happens. What ensues is a very funny story of reversals.

Will Huddleston's obsessed performance is wonderful as the fantasy-driven barrister bent on imposing a twisted mental logic on both his client and the external world. Charlie Shoemaker is hilarious as his foil, playing the confused, but after a while eager-to-please wife-murderer who reads his barrister's game and, out of co-dependent courtesy, tries to support the wackiness.

Much of the play's appeal is its unexpected quirkiness. The story is backwards in many ways. The status between the two characters frequently reverses.

The meaningful part of the lives of these two men turns out to be the elaborate legal fantasy that they enthusiastically create in the prison cell. In the external world, neither of them makes much of a splash.

The second one-act of the evening, "Mary's Wedding," is a wistful Canadian play about love and war. Structurally, it has similarities to "The Dock Brief," and it's easy to see why director Gayle Cornelison paired the two together. Like "The Dock Brief," "Mary's Wedding" employs a backwards story that takes place in a dream world.

In "Mary's Wedding," a woman in the Canadian plains, on the eve of her 1920 wedding, once again experiences a recurring dream about the young man who was the love of her life six years earlier, before he went off to World War I and died. The entire play is this dream.

The dream runs backwards in chronological time, as the woman and her dead lover are able to step out of their characters and comment on their own story. At times they struggle to change its outcome. The play has moments of great emotional power.

The Sunnyvale staging is played by two young actors, and feels in certain ways like a youth theater production, more than an adult theater production. In the role of Mary, Jaclyn Blythe shows raw talent as a performer, but she doesn't seem to have thought through the larger journey of her character, or where the moment-to-moment emotions of her character fit into that larger journey.

As a result, the emotional beats often don't seem to fit into the larger story. Additionally, she's asked at times to double as the character of an army cavalry sergeant. She has trouble creating performance distinctions for that secondary character.

The script also relinquishes some of its story suspense by running in reversed chronological sequence. Having said that, "Mary's Wedding" has a very powerful ending that left members of the audience teary-eyed and emotionally run through the wringer.

Both of these one-acts are reminders that, as human beings, we don't live so much in external reality, as we do in our dreams.

Rating: Three stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@yahoo.com.