Nancy Lantis, Sanya Arnold and Jorge Luis Aguila (Photo courtesy of Eclipse Theatre LA)
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Eclipse Theatre at The Main (Santa Clarita)
Through Nov. 26
There’s a Celtic breeze blowing onto the Oregon Coast in Phil Lantis’s and Nancy Lantis’s new play, set in a local tavern. The play adheres to all the principles of yarn-spinning and hyperrealism and secrets revealed that go with Irish bar plays. Behind the Lantis’ set, and its wall of photos containing boats and ships, and a dart board, and a fully stocked bar — or perhaps in front of it — floats something mythological: the fable of a man who yearns for the sea, which is his first love. His bride is his second love next to the ocean; this turns out to be her undoing. This fable will trickle its way into the story, with its backdrop rainstorm that keeps surging, underscoring the play’s themes of isolation and neglect
If we’re going to keep this State-side, this play’s closest ancestor is Eugene O’Neill — I kept thinking of his one-act “Hughie” about a late-night meeting between a hotel clerk and despondent/deranged hotel guest who’s so desperately lonely, he can’t stop talking.
There’s new data reporting that levels of loneliness (leading to mental health issues) are as high as they’ve ever been in the U.S. But that syndrome can be tracked back to the last century’s dramas of O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and William Inge. Seems that in the carve-my-own-destiny/individualist U.S. of A., knowing how to connect has been an issue for some time.
The play is not yet ready for prime time; it needs more chiseling to sort out issues of what’s private and public, and what conforms to the realistic genre in which both authors have lodged it.
Set in the present day, Beachcomber opens with aging barkeep Cap (Mike Fleming) and an older African-American couple, Theo and Sunny (Kevin Linell and Kacy Powell-Thorps), who are dropping by on a rainy night. This is not a bar that caters to denizens, but rather to strangers who wander in.
Still it doesn’t take long (ten minutes or so) for Cap to spill out his personal backstory to these people whom he’s never before met. Within 20 minutes, they’re all pontificating on wishes and regrets. Dunno, I didn’t buy it. Too easy. Too convenient. As one audience member noted at intermission, “That sure was a lot of exposition.”
There’s unmined tension in how the older couple might tug and pull out that personal information from a reluctant and possibly taciturn barkeep, but that’s not yet on the stage.
Things pick up with the arrival of a young, engaged-to-be-married couple, Raul and Rosemary (Jorge Luis Aguila and Sanya Arnold). He’s a professor of literature at the University of Oregon, and she’s his baby-faced White ex-student with a thing for Latino guys like Raul. Hmmm. He’s only 25, and his dialogue suggests that he’s a full-time if not a tenure-track professor — the university promised to give him more interesting classes than intro courses, he reports, once he settles in (a promise they couldn’t make to an adjunct, what with scheduling idiosyncrasies and professional obligations to their full-timers). This means that after graduating at, say, age 22, it took him only three years to go from a B.A. to a PhD, unless he was hired to teach literature full-time with only a Masters degree. All of this is possible, but unlikely at a place such as U of O, and the unlikeliness of it doesn’t gets explained.
Like Cap, Raul is also a blabbermouth revealing personal details to anybody who might listen. To Rosemary’s (and the play’s) credit, she protests his spilling nuggets of their relationship to strangers, at last marking a divide between what’s public and what’s private. She brings this up upon her return from puking in the restroom. In fact, her entrance is marked by a rush to the bathroom. There’s an explanation for this. Let’s just say it’s not seasickness.
Things really pick up with the arrival of Gail (as in Gale), played by Nancy Lantis in a spitfire performance. Gail is a strutting, masculine female who’s both bitter and clairvoyant, capable through sheer audacity of excavating private secrets from unwilling subjects.
The play will settle onto the melancholy of Cap, whose bliss was found on the sea, a kind of euphoria that cost him his family.
This sounds horribly judgmental, but perhaps, before getting married, Cap and his bride might have discussed his obsession with being on the water, so it might not have led to such resentments and inexorable tragedy.
Barry Agin’s staging of the capable ensemble serves its purpose, in a play that relies on the kindness of strangers.
Eclipse Theatre LA, 24266 Main St., Newhall. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 2 pm; thru Nov. 26. www.beachcomber.eventbrite.com. Running time: Two hours, including intermission
