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review There's a new school in town. It's called the University of Rude. As in Rude Guerrilla Theater Company. Now, there is Orange County theater, and then there is Rude G, which -- just midway through its third season -- continues to ramp up a local theater scene too often locked in an ugly, vicious cycle of Herb Gardner-Ira Levin-Neil Simon nod-offs. Anyone seriously interested in the challenge and power of consistently intelligent theater presented at a Big Apple level -- from the halls of Marguerite Parkway to the shores of Town Center Drive -- should enroll at once in the University of Rude. Rude G's current offering is Ted Tally's "Terra Nova", a production that -- a few small quibbles notwithstanding -- solidly reinforces this young company's growing reputation as the premier storefront theater in Orange County. Tally's 1977 drama, a hallucinatory downward spiral tracing English explorer Robert Falcon Scott (Jay Michael Fraley)'s ill-fated 1911 expedition to the South Pole, is a play intended for a space and a budget much larger than Rude G's, but director Sharyn Case convincingly demonstrates that less can be more. Working only with a bare stage painted white and a wooden sled that is both a prop and storage space for the set, Case and her able ensemble fashion a compelling world of hope and despair, defeat and triumph that lacks nothing and needs nothing more. Case is also perfectly in sync with Tally's time-tripping structure, flawlessly interweaving the agonizing trek to the bottom of the world with Scott's relationship back in England with his wife Kathleen (Lisa Layne Griffiths), and recurring imagined encounters with his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen (David Rousseve). In less sure hands, such a demanding construct could turn quickly to mush, but under Case's guidance remains unwaveringly sure, fluid and concise. The play itself is not without flaws. Tally dances around some compelling themes -- the sporting honor of the 19th Century British Empire colliding with the crudely modern "just win, baby" drive of Amundsen's Norwegians; the irony of a man so devoted to his charges' welfare that he ends up ensuring their doom -- without ever fully committing to either. Tally's weakest writing comes in his exchanges between Scott's men, which seem often to be nothing more than time-filling, back-slapping male bonding. Tally's strongest writing -- at times extraordinarily so -- is between Scott and Kathleen, given a world-class turn here by Fraley (is there anything he can't do?) and Griffiths. Kathleen, an anecdotal, time-fractured role that could easily devolve into the shrill or the vapid, is delicately powerful in Griffiths' intelligent, restrained, and finely-modulated rendering. Her performance, like Fraley's, is an acting clinic in itself. Happily, there is not a weak link in the entire cast. Rousseve, continuing the strong presence he brought many a time to the late, lamented Theater District boards, makes a one-man Greek chorus out of the specter-like Amundsen, and of Scott's men, Christian Holiday as Wilson and Darrin Cox as Evans shine particularly bright. Now, about those quibbles...in such a fevered, swirling netherworld as Case & Co. have created here, I cannot help but think there were opportunities missed in Heather Grindstaff's functional but not particularly inspired lighting design. Likewise, David Gallo's sound, which is limited pretty much to standard-issue howling wind effects, seems lacking. And, with a program that gives no indication of when the play is set, the zippered, nylon windbreakers Scott and his men wear throughout are a bit disconcerting, giving the play an immediate and undeniably contemporary look that takes time to shake. But these are quibbles, and ultimately cannot detract from the power and skill of this fine production. Rude Guerrilla is not content with merely peeking out from behind the Orange Curtain. It seems determined to rip the damn thing from its rungs. It's about time. Go. Learn. "Terra Nova", Fri.-Sun.
thru May 7 Copyright © 2000 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |