Good gay Green Horton and Bergeron excel at the St. Lawrence BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	VISITING MR. GREEN By Jeff Baron | Directed by Robert Fish | With Allen Bergeron and Chris Horton | Produced by the Good Theater, at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center, Portland | through Oct 16 | Call 207.885.5883

In your classical comedy, a younger world butts up against an older order. In Good Theater’s comedy Visiting Mr. Green (directed by Robert Fish), it’s a literal butting: Single young professional Ross nearly wipes out orthodox old widower Mr. Green with his car. The impact, in the spirit of the ancients, rattles both of their worlds.

As penance for his role in the near-accident, Ross (Allen Bergeron) is assigned by a New York City Court to make a weekly house call to Mr. Green (Chris Horton). The old man is a deeply conservative Russian Jew, intolerant to change, and cranky, and he and the liberal Ross (also Jewish) don’t exactly hit it off immediately. But after a few weeks and several take-out cups of gourmet kosher soup, the men become not just friends, but foils of a classically comedic sort: After a few circular conversations about Mr. Green’s marriage and about "finding the right woman" for Ross, it becomes obvious that Ross is gay — or, a "fagele," as a stunned Mr. Green disdainfully pronounces in Yiddish. What follows are the quakings of two men at a fault line of experience and prejudice as they struggle to understand each other.

Director Fish’s forthright production has the benefit of Allen Bergeron and Chris Horton, both fine local actors. Bergeron is fairly new to Portland, but most recently had an exceptional run as Lady Macbeth in Lucid Stage’s gender-bending spring production. Horton is one of the city’s veteran greats, having performed over the years with the old Vintage Rep, Mad Horse, and the Theater Project, among other companies, and played Duncan alongside Bergeron in Lucid’s Macbeth. In league together again, Horton and Bergeron are dynamic in portraying the contrasts, the chafing, and, finally, the concessions between their characters.

Visiting is the first of the four plays Jeff Baron has written to date, and it has met with great success. Since its year-long run at the Union Square Theatre in New York, it’s been translated into 20 languages, performed over 200 times around the world, and awarded numerous awards. In light of such mass approval, one might expect the script to be either a work of genius or else sufficiently pedestrian to appeal to a vast swath of world viewers, and — well, let’s just say that a Stoppard or a Mamet Baron is not. Visiting confronts bigotry head-on, is deeply empathetic, and is pointedly pertinent to gay-rights conversations happening everywhere from the Vatican to Maine’s 2005 Question 1, but the script is not an exercise in nuance. The parallel situations and crises of the two men are a bit pat, certain of their revelations seem somewhat convenient, and the resolutions between them come a little too handily.

That said, Horton and Bergeron bring to this direct script great humanity and wit. Some of Horton’s difficult transitions from grumpy to cheerful feel a little rough, but Horton has fine instincts when it comes to revealing his character’s willfulness by minutiae — eyes, the set of his lips, small gestures. After a fall, Mr. Green accepts Ross’s support to walk across the room, then discards the younger man with a disdainful flick of his hand. Horton can also shift gears admirably, as when in a rare physical frenzy he tears the house apart in search of something long hidden from him. He lets us see his deep faith, by degrees, as a source of both warmth and narrowness.

Ross is more demonstrative than the older man all along about his outrage and hurt, and Bergeron navigates this candor intelligently. He alternately flares, smolders, and offers warmth to the man who represents both bigotry and a chance to redeem.

Craig Robinson’s impressive set is an elaborate execution of realism, from the wood-laminate cupboards to the real-life fridge, to the assorted ceramic knick-knacks on a shelf. Nothing in Mr. Green’s apartment is left to the imagination; even the brick building across the alley is visible through his living room window. The set makes this old home at once comfortable and claustrophobic.

This being its second production this year to deal explicitly with gay-tolerance issues (March’s A Man of No Importance related the coming-out of a young community-theater director), the Good Theater is earning distinction as a professional Portland company particularly concerned with gay rights. One hopes that the Good Theater’s very accessible treatment of bias draws more than just the choir: As in your classic comedy, the impact of Visiting’s collided worlds leads to progress, and in the real world, too, change hangs on every encounter.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com