Trading places

A passionate Savage comes to the Theater Project

By Katherine Joyce

Savage in Limbo runs through November 18 at the Theater Project in Brunswick. call (207) 729-8584

NINETEENTH NERVOUS BREAKDOWN: Michele Livermore, Wendy Poole, and Heather Weafer look for change unsuccessfully.

As I browsed through the bookstore last week, looking for a birthday present for my mother, a particular book caught my eye. The front cover read: “What if the question is not ‘Why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be?’ but ‘Why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?’ ” That, I thought to myself, is a very good question.

The Theater Project takes on questions of this magnitude with their season’s first show, Savage in Limbo. The skilled cast brings active life to John Patrick Shanley’s one-act play about being trapped in a rut, and being unable, or unwilling, to make the choices to bring about escape. His characters spend all of their time imagining ways to become the people they want to be, and never try wanting to be the people they really are. They are, therefore, themselves (as being someone else is not possible), tainted with regret and self-loathing.

Somewhere in the Bronx, Murk’s Bar (Murk played by Craig Ela) is a safe place, where nothing changes. The bar has one stool (eternally occupied by April White), two tables with one chair each, and a shelf of dead plants (which Murk keeps because they are reliable). On this particular night, Murk serves already-poured drinks to the four people who frequent his place. (Either Murk’s life is so predictable that he knew how many of each drink would be needed, or someone didn’t want to deal with Ela pouring drinks on stage).

Ela plays Murk with an endearing gruffness through which it is easy to see his compassionate character. Murk is a difficult character to play. He’s on stage for the whole show, but says very little. This difficulty is compounded by the placement of the bar up center, drawing the audience’s eye, even when the action is taking place elsewhere. Murk’s integrity is occasionally rendered questionable due to an unnecessary limp, but he rarely comes out from behind the bar.

April (played by Michele Livermore) is a disillusioned and sad character, but Murk seems to like her. Livermore is convincing as the hilarious drunk, executing Shanley’s difficult, drunken language — written to allow for amazingly bald transitions between humor and misery — with considerable skill. This April is funny and sad, and infinitely sympathetic.

Soon, Denise Savage (played by Wendy Poole) arrives, a bundle of energy, ready to become a new Denise. Nobody is really sure why she picked a run-down bar as the place to transform, but this irrationality is part of her charm. She’s looking around town for some action, and finds things dead. It’s Monday night, 7:30. Is she really surprised the bars are dead? Does anybody suspect that the reason her inspiration to change her life brought her into a dead bar is that she is not actually going to change, but is rather going to toss around some ideas just to make herself feel like she’s taking action?

In walks the crying Linda Rotunda (Heather Weafer), just as Denise Savage is beginning to settle down to play solitaire (she brought cards with her, folks — not the equipment for a life-altering evening). Linda, too, is in need of a change. Her boyfriend wants to see other women. She needs to turn her life around, force herself forward, so that she doesn’t fall apart without her Monday nights with Tony.

One might imagine that Savage — a 32-year old virgin who spends most of her time taking care of her aging mother — as somewhat chaste, having difficulty with sensuality, wearing a prissy veneer that she’s trying to shake off. One might imagine Rotunda, on the other hand, as dangerous and sexy. She’s had three children out of wedlock, and she and her boyfriend are known for being hot and heavy.

In this production, Rotunda, the alleged harlot of the grammar school they attended (Savage kindly points out that she gets knocked up every time she stops walking), is blond, in a pink turtleneck and jeans. She does not have a lot of sexual energy, and ýarries herself with some discomfort (she slouches and scuffs her heels as she walks). The chaste and lonely Savage is played by Poole with a magnetic intensity that reeks equally of frustration and sensuality. Her spiky hair and black mini skirt/black leather coat costume make her seem like a “bad girl.” I would have expected the costumes and the casting to be the opposite of what they were, but that added an interesting dimension to watching these two women play out their story.

So now the bar is full. Murk is behind the bar, April is on the stool, Rotunda and Savage each have their own spot. Much of the dialogue takes place with everyone (but Murk) sitting. Every once in a while Rotunda or Savage will get up to make a point, or to reach out to the other. The motivation behind getting up is sometimes a little suspect (perhaps motivated more by a desire to not perform the entire play from a sitting position than from any emotional impetus), but the staging is fairly clean.

Then we are joined by Tony Aronica, Linda’s boyfriend (played by Craig Michael Bowden). He, too, is looking for a change. He has always dated girls like Linda, but an experience (on the sly) makes him suspect that there is something else out there. He plans to change himself completely. But his more immediate problem is that there is no room for him in this bar. So he stands. In spite of this awkwardness, Bowden gives a solid performance. His chemistry with Rotunda is not the sizzling lust the script suggests, but director Christopher Price helps them to overcome that hurdle by giving them an intimacy not normally developed in productions of this play.

All three women in this story play out a massive emotional arc. When emotions are intense from the outset, it is difficult to dig deep for the energy to pull off an emotional climax. Using lighting cues to isolate characters at particular moments might have been an effective way to give the actors permission to let loose — without breaching the realism by having a breakdown in a bar — as well as deal with some of the staging difficulties.

Savage, Rotunda, and Aronica are all ravenous for change, but end up right back where they started. They all want to be people they are not. They want to live other lives. The beauty of the theater, of course, is that the players get that very opportunity. Here, they make the most of it.

Shanley’s scripts are invariably packed with passion and energy — which attract actors and directors — but tend to have similar inherent flaws. Awkward staging is one of them. This cast and crew encounter this problem, and, although they may not solve it, the quality of the production rises above such issues. The more passion they put into it, the more they put themselves on the line in the most heated moments of the show, the less the audience notices things like people being in weird places on stage.

Instead, the audience can focus on the lesson Murk teaches: that a little well-placed compassion can go a long way in making one’s life fulfilling.

Katherine Joyce can be reached at ingliskat@aol.com