Stealing beauty

PSC gets experimental with The Good Thief

By Katherine Joyce

This weekend, PSC plays host to a full read-through of Draven Gonzalez’s Fenced In and a performance of A Company of Girls’ Sticky Like a Frog. Call (207) 774-0465, or see “Listings” for days, times, and prices.

STAND UP: Christopher Gerald in The Good Thief.

And now for something completely different. Portland Stage Company is experimenting with adding short-run, edgy shows to its regular season. If this experiment works out, the gap between the fall and the winter season could soon be filled with one-weekend runs of interesting, hard-hitting, cutting edge theater. A new direction for PSC, this experiment stems from artistic director Anita Stewart’s desire to provide a forum for as much theater as is possible within PSC’s limited means. The shows will be small-scale productions that require as few resources as possible.

The first show in this experiment was The Good Thief, written by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, which ran this past weekend. This one-act, one-man show was racier than PSC’s usual material, which may have caught some traditional PSC audiences off guard, but is a tribute to the theater’s dedication to pushing the envelope, and may help the company to attract new audiences.

McPherson is a lauded young Irish playwright, and The Good Thief is only one of his award-winning plays. His use of the bittersweet humor of the Irish is enchanting, and manages to make the ugliest character appealing and sympathetic. The world he explores in this play is the worst modern Dublin has to offer, but his story is told so gently that the horror of it doesn’t sink in until the audience is friendly with a character good sense would have them dislike.

Starring in this one-man show is Portland native Christopher Fitzgerald. He plays a paid thug who has chosen to tell the audience about a job that went horribly awry. This thug is part of the Dublin underworld, and is paid to scare people into paying his boss. Although it’s not surprising that someone in such a field could fall victim to unfortunate circumstances, this particular thug has the gift of Irish charm, and the innate ability to tell a good story, so it doesn’t come off as cliché.

Fitzgerald captures well the conversational and casual style of Irish storytelling. On occasion, he betrays the true difficulty of performing a one-man show by trading animation and solid punch lines for just getting the lines out. Nonetheless, he does an admirable job of leading the audience through his intense and crazy journey with a little bit of humor, a little bit of anger, and a little bit of carefully guarded sentimentality.

The familiar PSC stage has been cleared of everything, all the way back to the brick wall at the back of the stage. There are no curtains, no backdrops, nothing but a stool placed down center. The stage floor still bears tape marking the placement of other sets. This minimalism may have been necessitated by PSC’s budget for this experiment, but was completely appropriate to the piece anyway. In fact, a set of any kind may have detracted from the narrator’s ability to paint with words the picture of his incredible escapade. The lights were a warm natural light, fully illuminating the stage for maximum coverage with minimum effort.

Director Henry Wishcamper, also a Portland native, returns to Maine from New York to team up with Fitzgerald for this project. Directing a one-person play is a hard job. There are no interactions to stage, or relationships to develop. Everything rests upon how one actor interacts with the audience. Although the character work was fantastic, the blocking consisted almost entirely of Fitzgerald sitting on the stool provided. The moments when he stood and illustrated his story with his body were the most successful moments in the show, and I wanted more.

I wanted so much more — I might have preferred if there had been no stool at all. When he was up, he was animated, funny, full of life. When he was down, he went on energy conservation mode to save up for the next time he got up. Admittedly, it is more difficult to remember such massive amounts of lines when fully animated. However, the difficulty must be overcome for a one-person show to reach its full potential.

In spite of these minor struggles, Wishcamper and Fitzgerald brought to life an incredibly complex and fascinating script. Fitzgerald’s comfortable presence on stage lent itself well to the subtlety with which playwright McPherson writes this horrific and humorous story. As a thug, Fitzgerald is thoroughly likable, with a casual sense of humor. He is the kind of guy with whom you would love to shoot pool. His dangerously warped personality is overshadowed by pleasantness. This tactic gains him an engaged audience, willing to go on the ride.

Seeing a new, edgy, show from Portland Stage Company is thrilling. If the experiment pans out, a new species of theater will be welcomed onto a stage that generally sees more mainstream, traditional theater. It is always admirable to increase the amount of theater offered, in spite of tight budgets, and using small-scale shows will satisfy budgetary constraints and spice it up a little for PSC. With any luck, audiences will embrace this diversity, allowing PSC to continue in this new vein.

Katherine Joyce can be reached at ingliskat@aol.com