Dealer's
Choice
by
Patrick Marber
CoHo Productions at Northwest 9th Avenue and Johnson Street,
295-3561
8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays, Closes June 20
$10-$12
It's true that the fate of English drama is in the hands of
the Irish. Whenever the theater has appeared to be in the
last spasms of redundancy, up crops a Sheridan, Shaw or Synge
(or, in America's case, an O'Neill) to revitalize the form.
Martin McDonagh and Conor MacPherson are the latest Irishmen
to save civilization with work that is drowning out the crying-towel
dithyrambs of Terrence McNally and Co. in this country. In
Britain, McDonagh and MacPherson are also setting the standard,
though they have had some stiff competition from two contemporaries.
Perhaps the most powerful young voice in British theater belonged
to Sarah Kane, who, sadly, committed suicide in February.
The other young British playwright is Patrick Marber, whose
last play, Closer, opened recently in New York to great
acclaim. Marber's first play, Dealer's Choice, opened
at the National's black-box Cottesloe Theatre in London in
1995 with little fanfare. But it soon made its presence known
and transferred to the West End's Vaudeville Theatre, winning
a coveted Evening Standard Award en route. But in Portland,
where the largest stage in town busies itself with Hallmark
Christmas pageants and an Easterish resurrection of William
Inge, it's taken the small CoHo Productions to finally introduce
us to a vital new voice in the theater.
On the surface, Marber's play seems quite simple. The first
two acts introduce us to characters who are planning a game
of poker in the basement of a restaurant. The final act
is the game itself. But the game is only a backdrop to a
profound study of character. Marber's men are all compulsive
individuals, haunted by the incubuses of habit and hope.
The playwright has created characters that are full-fleshed,
though luck-soured, never permitting them to become objects
of pity. There's Sweeney, a restaurant chef who muddles
through life; Frankie, Sweeney's flatmate, who hoards his
waiting tips to escape to Las Vegas and shares something
unspoken with Sweeney; Stephen, their boss, who seems to
be in complete control of his own life and everyone else's;
Carl, Stephen's son, a wastrel; Ash, an aging casino habitué;
and, finally, Mugsy, a Cockney climber whose plans for becoming
a restaurateur serve as a cruel but comic metaphor for pipe
dreams.
Marber calls his play pessimistic. Though bleak, it is
also a comedy--full of the flippant despair that one finds
in T. S. Eliot's Sweeney poems. As does his mentor, the
poet and critic Craig Raine, Marber easily finds significance
in the mundane and invests each line with a multitude of
meanings. Director Jeff Meyers has done an excellent job
of realizing Marber's world, though he is a bit handicapped
by the space, a defunct warehouse in the Pearl District.
The play would work better in an intimate full or three-corner
round, where the audience would actually feel that they
were sitting around the greater game table of the characters'
lives. One directorial problem is with the poker game itself,
which is broken up into four scenes that take the action
from midnight to morning. One doesn't really sense time
passing. There are no unbuttoned shirts or rolled-up sleeves
to mark the night's progression, nor do we see the sweat
of fear and frustration. But as his last production, Never
Swim Alone, showed, Meyers has fast become one of Portland's
best directors of actors.
The cast has mastered various British accents, with only
the odd "been" and "can't" giving the game away. But only
three of the actors--Chris Herman, Paul Floding and Bob
Holden--have captured the correct inflection. Herman's Mugsy
is excellent, his comic timing superb. Herman also acknowledges
the vulnerability that lies just under the skin of his bantam
Cockney dreamer. It's a faultless performance. Holden's
Ash is equally impeccable, from his world-weary delivery
to his intense silences. He communicates with his eyes more
than most actors can with their entire bodies.
Second-night pacing problems were evident in some of the
other performances. Grant Byington's Sweeney, Paul Floding's
Frankie and Sean Doran's Carl were a bit slow on cues. Byington
and Floding have carefully mapped out the twists in their
characters' relationship, creating a dynamic tension. Doran
captures Carl's scrounge and scratch existence well, looking
out on the world through chipped-glass eyes. But occasionally
he seems to be playing the emotion rather than the man.
David Bodin's Stephen, who is finally exposed as perhaps
the saddest and most compulsive of the men, is well-crafted,
though Bodin could rein in his earnestness a bit with some
classic British rigidity.
As in life, the game at the heart of Dealer's Choice
breaks up, as one by one the men move off into a cold morning.
It's a testament to the skill of Meyers and his cast that
the world they've created on stage seems to live on past
lights down.
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 19, 1999
|
