Put that in your poll Opinions are power in Tim Collins's one-man show BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	The Power Play Written and performed by Tim Collins. Directed by Larraine Brown. Produced at A Company of Girls, 10 Mayo Street, Portland, through January 30. Call (207) 775-2119.

The protagonist of Tim Collins’s Power Play is being terrorized. His downstairs neighbor assaults him 24/7 with deafening heavy-metal music, and he responds by banging on the floor with rolling pins, chop-sticks, meat tenderizers, and a seriously accelerating sense of trauma. His quandary feeds a subsequent obsession with the larger concept of terrorism, and, armed with a recorder, he stalks the streets of Portland, trying to find out how other people feel about feeling unsafe.

This is actually Collins’s own story, and it is likewise the process by which he gathered the fodder for the seven other characters — Portland residents who give him their two cents about politics, terror, and America — he portrays in The Power Play. We first see Collins, as himself, ask, "Do you ever worry about terrorism?" Then, with the help of a symbolic prop — a BoSox cap, a binder, a leather purse — Collins takes on his interviewee’s elocution and opinions: A guy drinking from a paper bag worries more about the conduct of the FBI. A right-winger derides young liberals for expressing their resentment through bumper stickers. An antiwar woman says she doesn’t like feeling justified upon hearing of more American deaths. The play progresses back and forth between character monologues and his own escalating domestic terror, and, along the way, the spectrum of rationality and extremism comes to seem a much more fluid slope.

Collins is simply a remarkable talent when it comes to character acting. From the unnerving, vaguely menacing smile of a smug Republican to the rabid, spitting prognostications of a guy in a hoody, to the meek teenage girl whose sentences all inflect upward like questions — these are characters from whom you don’t want to look away, not even for a moment, so richly textured and compelling are they. Perhaps the best compliment I can offer Collins’s work is that in addition to being civically sound and thought-provoking, it is genuinely fun — even when it is disturbing — to watch him transform into these characters and inhabit them with such sheer, witchy artistry.

The anticipated crux of the play is the moment of confrontation, finally, with his downstairs neighbor, and the revelation of what are, after all, stupidly small but self-fulfilling misunderstandings. The allegorical implications of their misconceptions could seem simplistic or trite in the hand of a lesser writer and actor, but Collins’s fine pacing and varied tones make the metaphor’s simplicity an elegant asset.

And in one sense, of course, Collins’s premise isn’t a metaphor at all, but rather is scathingly literal: In this play about power, communication itself proves to be a formidable force. It’s our responsibility to both hear and be heard, and it’s this right that Collins’s play at once celebrates and exercises.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com