Man of the hour

The Public Theatre scores

By Robert von Stein Redick

Side Man plays through March 25 at the Public Theatre, in Lewiston. Call (207) 782-3200.

A GREAT STEP: no weak performances, no simple villains.

Artistic obsession must be seen to be believed. What is this force, that saddles otherwise healthy humans with the ferocious need to dab paint on canvas, or scribble verse, or coax limbs out of marble? Darwinian explanations fall short. Dedication is attractive, sure, but only so far: a good friend once demonstrated his genius to me by becoming an exceptional potter in a week. His arrival in the evenings, however — wild-eyed, sweat-stained, clay flaking from his beard — never failed to alarm the women in our lives. And the less said about his breath, the better.

Seeing may be believing, but to truly grasp artistic obsession there’s no substitute for feeling it. Warren Leight’s Side Man, which opened Friday at the Public Theatre in Lewiston, extends such an opportunity. It also exposes the ruin any obsession can make of lives spent in its proximity. Happily for all, Leight turns these tricks as much through wistful humor as pathos.

A side man is a jazz accompanist, part of the versatile, take-us-anywhere team that propped up the sound of major stars. The big-band era turned them into cultural heroes; Elvis and rock plunged them into oblivion. Even their own princes — Sinatra, Ellington, Benny Goodman — used them up like so many wooden reeds, made to blow until they crack. They might earn solos, but rarely any lasting fame, and virtually never wealth.

Such has been the fate of Gene, a New York trumpet player “in the twilight of a mediocre career.” That little self-descriptor is Gene at his most eloquent; for the rest of the play he is a mumbler, clueless about all things non-musical, a man who only remembers to shower if he writes himself a note. Only with horn to lips does he find grace — a grace to break your heart, as his son Clifford admits.

It falls to Clifford (Stephen Wolfert) to step in and narrate this memory play. But in a sense Clifford has been stepping in all his life: to cramped living rooms where Daddy snores on the sofa after all-night gigs; to the cave-like clubs where the musicians shut out the world, spouses included; to the impossible role of caregiver for a mother driven mad by her swindle of a marriage.

The play opens with farewells. Clifford, fully grown, is heading west, at last prepared to trust these benighted (and now divorced) parents to look after themselves. As always, his father’s a bit out of reach, just a song or two into a long evening set. Lingering at the back of the gloomy lounge, Clifford takes the opportunity to recall his family’s 30 years with Gene’s addiction.

Our first stop is the welfare line, 1977. On hand are Gene and his brothers-in-brass, four swank Jazz cats in dark jackets and five-o’clock shadow. Indigence is their badge of honor, proof positive that they’d rather starve than leave “the business.” Clifford’s first unemployment check is cheered as a victory: “Today,” he tells us, “I am a man.” Two men, in fact: the post-adolescent starved for a father’s approval, and the older narrator who watches the scene alongside us, pointing a wry finger at the players. “What do you do when an ex-junkie compliments you on your veins?” he asks, as Jonesy, the decrepit one-eyed trombone player (Hamilton Clancy), gapes with envy at his forearms: “Nice rope!” The very inventors of cool, these men make an art form of irony as surely as music. Ziggy (Russell Berrigan), a defiantly-lisping jazz nerd in horn-rimmed glasses, praises Jonesy to Clifford: even with a disability check for his eye, lost to a bad ocular injection, Jonesy “still comes down every week to sign for his unemployment. That is a work ethic!”

Gallows humor, but such is the life Clifford recalls. His mother Terry (Cary Barker) bears a particularly heavy burden, as the passing years strip her of any hope to rival music in Gene’s heart. Rage, drink, and violence ensue, but Gene carries on, serene in his disregard for a wife he hasn’t touched, as she accuses in one howling episode, since the night their son was conceived. Barker’s evocation of Terry’s decline proceeds in vivid steps: a new despondency to her voice, disorder to her hair, tremors in the hand that gropes for booze or cigarettes. As Gene, David Sitler makes the source of her agony plainly visible — no small accomplishment when one considers that he must project a state of permanent vagueness.

Gluing the evening together is Clifford’s laconic storytelling. Beneath his tone of wistful comprehension one senses the 30 years it took him to earn it, to respond to a bottle-throwing, door-slamming, drag-out fight with a smile and the words: “It’s good for a family to have rituals.”

There are no weak performances, and no simple villains. Not in a play wise enough to hazard four wordless minutes in the second act, as the musicians, old and penniless now, surrender themselves to a bootleg recording of “A Night in Tunisia.” We need not love jazz to love the scene; their rapture is enough. As the music swells to fill the theatre, the men sway on their bar stools like puppets, and we find ourselves suddenly, shockingly, in a place beyond blame.

This kind of scene is not without risk, but in a living art form, the absence of risk is the guarantee of mediocrity. No danger of that here. With Side Man, the Public Theatre takes a great step towards consolidating its position as one of the most serious and ambitious theaters in northern New England. If this is what comes of a little obsession, I’m all for it.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.