``Reason,'' declares one of playwright Charles Deemer's characters, ``isn't calling the shots out there.''
Yet in his rude and funny drama ``The
Half-
Life Conspiracy,''
Deemer tries to reason out an astonishing number of things: cold and
hot war, cold and hot love, theatrical fashion, nuclear brinksmanship,
the male and female psyches, the appeal of soap opera, the vagaries of
sex, the possibility that we're living in the dying light of a universe
that's already disappeared.
More astonishing, he brings all those
elements into an unlikely but workable synthesis, creating a two-hour
political comedy that constantly engages the mind on its way to
significant matters of the heart.
Firehouse Theater, under the
perceptive and lively direction of Julie Akers, has just opened a fresh
and reckless revival of Deemer's 1983 play that reminds us what a good
playwright this Portland writer can be. ``The
Half-
Life Conspiracy''
has a tightly coiled structure, a rough wit, and an economy of words
that's gone slack in his more recent excursions into grand-scale
``simultaneous action'' theater.
Deemer proposes an intimate
connection between the private confusions of everyday life and the
great events that alter global destiny: a psychic terrain where the
unthinkable and the humdrum intersect.
Comically, his serious
reflections on the world's male malady (``extinction is consistent with
the male way of doing things'') are told through the slightly tawdry
conventions of soap opera, or a subversive aping of them.
The
play takes place in a single evening and early morning. The ragingly
conventional Portland Community Players uncharacteristically have
decided to produce a controversial one-act by a Hollywood soap writer,
Robert (David Heath).
Robert -- a nom de plume -- comes to town
for the play's premiere and discovers -- shock! -- that the director,
Cynthia (Patricia Blem), is his former wife, who jilted him for another
woman, Ann (Mary Jo AbiNader). The strain is evident, and made worse by
the fact that Ann desperately wants to come out of the closet and
Cynthia desperately wants to stay in.
Meanwhile, theater
president Joe Barge (Gary Powell) is having an affair with sexy and
impressionable Willow (Mary Kadderly), who's married to Joe's best
friend, Bill (Mel Fletcher), who thinks Willow's been playing around
with the local theater critic. Willow and Robert also immediately start
casting meaningful glances: ah, the intricacies of flirtation,
seduction and love!
Robert's seething play is about a personal
tragedy in the wake of a Soviet nuking of Seattle. It's really quite
awful, which provides much mirth, especially as everyone's taking it
seriously. But its connections to the characters' ``real lives'' are --
well -- explosive.
Director Akers does a fine job of playing
Deemer's extremes for all they're worth without making things seem
ridiculous. Her actors are beautifully tuned to one another -- there's
some excellent, well-balanced work here -- and Heath seems born to the
role of the outrageous, ironic, tersely romantic goader-hero, Robert.
He's like a comic burr under everyone's saddle: It makes for a wild and
provocative ride.
THEATER REVIEW The
Half-
Life Conspiracy
Where: Firehouse Theater, 1436 S.W. Montgomery When: 8 p.m. Fridays and
Saturdays through Feb. 25 Tickets: $6-$8.50 (280-6592).
Photo By MARC VISNICK.