The Australia Project II: Australia Strikes Back (Week 2)

More of the same can be a good thing. Last week, The Production Company treated us to four off-kilter one acts, all of which were written by Australian playwrights who were thinking of America at the time. This week, it's another three one-acts, from the occasionally filth "967 Tuna" (Australian for excellent) to the beautiful "The Beekeeper" (no Australian translation needed there) and the hypnotically turbulent "Syphon."

The strongest piece is Emma Vuletic's "The Beekeeper," which sets the plight of colony collapse disorder (a k a, where are all the bees in America going?) against an Australian mother's inability to properly carry a child to term. Just as America imports Australian bees to keep their hives alive, Olivia (Chandler Vinton), turns to an American surrogate, Amber (Lethia Nall), to help her finally deliver a baby to term. (Such work is illegal Down Under.) Patrick McNulty plays with swift lighting cues to jump cuts between moments in time, but his best choice is to have distance communicated by silence rather than space. The two stand close to one other as they talk (or don't) by e-mail, and these quiet moments are tender and effective. Vuletic's writing is also very strong, jumping between the natural conversation, monologues about bees, and occasional legalese (to enforce the alienating "contract"). Vinton crackles through Olivia's necessary stiffness, adding a dash of loose desperation that connects us to her nerves, and Nall, rarely dropping her forced nonchalance, manages to convey a stream of raw emotions.

Brendan Cowell's "967 Tuna," on the other hand, is a play of surfaces. Jeremy (Nick Flint), a hyperchill Australian, rents a fishing boat from an uptight American, Captain Steve (Michael Gnat). As they converse (in a short and snappy patter that brings a mellower David Rabe to mind), the American becomes increasingly possessive and bellicose, while the carefree Australian's thick skin starts to become a frightened shell. The script is too playful--shallow ruminations from stereotypes--and while Flint and Gnat have great chemistry, Mark Armstrong can't steer the script into deeper waters. (Instead, he succeeds at dressing it up, evoking the cramped deck, the lapping nausea of waves, and an exciting high-speed drive.) Steve's wife, Dorothy (Sarah Eliana Bisman) is a deus ex machina, a physical metaphor for the daunting US(A), but her slow, unnatural dialogue clashes with the clipped tones of the play and ultimately serves as little more than a life raft off a meandering ship.

Tommy Murphy's "Syphon," on yet another hand, is buried so deep under the skin that it's never clear why your skin prickles. Perhaps its the deadened performances from Stephen Pilkington and Todd d'Amour, two druggies who come to live with the obsessive compulsive Isabelle (Erin Krakow), or perhaps it's the way time flies by--days, weeks, months, years--without bringing anything more than superficial changes. Murphy metes out the pace with staccato mundaneness ("Hey," "Yah," and "Dunno" are the oft-repeated "lyrics"), and director Shoshana Gold brings in the absurd properties with a slow, at first imperceptible, fade. But the conclusion fizzles where it should explode, not a bad trip so much as an impenetrable one. You want to go along for the ride, but you can't seem to follow homeless "monsters" or the senselessness of a student uprising.

As individual pieces, only "The Beekeeper" stands on its own, but as a collection, the Week 2 series serves to showcase not just Australian playwrights, each with their own unique styles and visions, but the directors and actors importing those views to America. And that's just filth. Your last chance to check out the four plays of Week 3 is 9/27-9/30 at chashama.

PLAY: "A Lie of the Mind"

Photo/Rachel Wood

One of the terrifying beauties of humanity is our ability to make anything true, if only we believe in it hard enough. Sam Shepard's playwriting is a true staple of this culture: his plays very often bend our beliefs, but his characters are always truthful enough to hold us steady. His 1985 drama, A Lie of the Mind, now in an intimate production at Manhattan Theater Source, is filled with metaphoric dressings, and doesn't balk at abusing the American flag to emphasize our own dissociative culture.

Here, the persistence of memory overrides death (the star-battered lovers, Jake and Beth cannot escape their thoughts of each other), and the stubbornness of love overwrites memory (though Beth cannot live with her abusive love, she cannot live without it either, which is why her mind transfers it onto Jake's brother, Frankie). With every line, truth spills over the top of the bucket, revealing self-deception. The one failing in Shepard's play is that to flood us with guilt, he first has to add a lot of rambling to that bucket. It's a flaw in name only, perhaps, for the performances and dialog are a delight, but the show does stagger on for three hours, and there are stretches of indulgent text. The third act is too forceful with its metaphors, too confusing with its conclusions, and too distracted by its subplot.

Buried Child is the better Shepard play, more focused and precise, but A Lie of the Mind gets a lot of mileage from its characters and range. It isn't until Act 3 that the two-pronged narrative (it switches between Jake scenes and Beth scenes) loses its edge. But right from the bat we're drawn in: the play opens with Jake frantically phoning his brother to confess the murder of Beth and then simultaneously surprises and saddens us by revealing that she's actually still alive: in the care of her brother, Mike, but mentally damaged from the abuse.

These sharp initial scenes with Beth are the tragic strength of the show: her desperate cry for Jake ("HEEZ MY HAAAAAAAAAART!"), in spite of all he has done to her, is a wail rivaled only by "Stellllla!" It's a fantastic role, and Laura Schwenniger delivers: she is clear and precise, though her character remains in a fog; she struggles beautifully with words, even though as an actor she is in control. Likewise, Todd d'Amour's portrayal of Jake plays up the petulant violence with a series of childlike mannerisms and an overburdened gravel voice: his eyes flinch with every scolding even as they smolder with a longing for his love.

As the play continues, the circle widens in scope to show us their families: Mike's mother, Lorraine, is a craggy realist, and his sister, Sally, is a tough-as-nails survivor; Beth's father, Baylor, is a domineering rancher, and her mother, Meg, is pliant and a bubbly font of trivia. Cindy Keiter makes for a delightfully dotty Meg ("Don't yell in the house, the walls can't take it! Screaming is not the thing that we were made for"), and Emily Mitchell has the harsh maternal instincts of Lorraine down cold (just watch her play "Helicopter" with Jake).

The scenic design, by David Roman, emphasizes the split-screen differences by using a firm, red-washed adobe color for Jake's solidity, and a cold, drowningly dark aqua blue for Beth's infirmity. All in all, the theatrics are underplayed by director Daryl Boling, but this contrast stands out. (If only the choice to use bluegrass music for the transitions had been so strikingly played up: as is, the upbeat music clashes politely in the background like elevator Muzak.) When it comes down to it, Shepard is more concerned with truth of character than anything else, and this production couldn't ask for a better cast.