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Sweet
Joyride Through 'Chesapeake' IF LIFE WERE FAIR, we could send everyone off to Second Stage's latest attraction without revealing much more than our wild enthusiasm for a one- man play with the deceptively straightforward title "Chesapeake." If theater and journalism, just for today, could conspire to keep audiences as uninformed as possible about Lee Blessing's brilliantly off-kilter fantasy and Mark Linn-Baker's deeply lovable performance, people might get a chance to duplicate our pleasure at discovering the hairpin philosophical joyride with so few expectations. Basically, we'd like to be able to say three words and leave it at that. Arts. Politics. Dogs. Anyone who finds each word intriguing on its own and the three irresistible together should be transported by the shaggy Blessing story that Linn-Baker spins with little more than a couple of hours, some consummate tragicomic technique and a stageful of thick dirt. Arts. Politics. Dogs. And just the right dash of mystical, you know, unknowables. Linn-Baker plays a fellow named Kerr (sound it out), a bisexual, Southern-born New York performance artist whose National Endowment for the Arts grant becomes campaign fodder for conservative hometown Senator Therm Pooley. At various moments, Linn-Baker also totally - without change of Kerr's lumpy clothes or even an apparent twitch - becomes the Senator, the man's manipulative wife and his pretty, young fundamentalist employee. Senator Therm has a dog, a Chesapeake Bay retriever called Lucky - also called Rat. Kerr is convinced that the dog is a "political knickknack" hauled out to do the animal equivalent of kissing babies. Kerr decides to kidnap the pooch as a piece of performance art and ... But we're telling too much. Suffice it to say that Linn-Baker, an actor not averse to occasional mugging, is blissfully controlled here - more the wise old-young soul in "My Favorite Year" than the goofball from ABC's "Perfect Strangers" and big Broadway comedies with Nathan Lane. With his sad mustache, trapped- animal eyes, quick body and even faster mouth, he interrupts sides of himself to comment on other sides of himself with impossibly easy conviction. Listen to the number of syllables he manages to find in the word "fundamentalist" or other words Kerr seems almost to taste. And when Kerr starts discovering the magical world of aromas, well ... we're saying too much again. Linn-Baker's Kerr would just be a performance, however, without Blessing to make this performance art. Until now, we've identified the playwright with such intelligent, fairly conventional, middlebrow works as "A Walk in the Woods." But here he is, fearlessly out there, with hints of Kafka and comic books, the Old Testament and "Lassie," not to mention the afterlife and the obvious timely connection to our mayor's new arts platform. The text is rich with inspiration and mockery on both sides of the culture wars. Kerr begins with some touching and hilarious insights about his father, who instilled a love of art in his son through outrageously original means. There are also ruminations on the mixed benefits of extended childhoods and an eloquent, breakaway senatorial speech in defense of art that we'd like to have sent to all taxpayers. All this happens with a casual sense of play and a serious grasp of impotent rage. The play, which first opened at Linn-Baker's New York Stage and Film, is directed with elegant foolishness by the co- founder of his company, Max Mayer. Ace designer Adrianne Lobel - who's married to the actor - has placed the story in suitably unsettling simplicity: mounds of outdoor dirt surrounded by the walls and skylight of, perhaps, an artist's studio. Kerr's shadows on the walls, lit by James F. Ingalls, have the power of dream and nightmare. Best of all, we never have the slightest idea where Blessing and Linn-Baker are taking us. Trust them to make the destination as profound as the journey is entertaining.
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