Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)   (1988-Current)
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WITTY `CONSPIRACY'' TAPS HEAVY ISSUES
Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)
April 12, 1995
Author: BARRY JOHNSON - of the Oregonian Staff
Estimated printed pages: 2

Charles Deemer's ``The Half-Life Conspiracy'' has lots of suggestive bits in it that demonstrate Deemer's skill as a playwright. He has the moxie to write a play-within-a-play-within-a-play, for example.

Still, the part that proves immediately winning to Portland audiences is that he imagines that the first city to go in a nuclear exchange is . . . Seattle. There's a Portland playwright at work for you.

``The Half-Life Conspiracy,'' which Deemer wrote in the early '80s, is receiving an energetic, if occasionally bumpy, production from the Eclectic Theatre Company in the tiny Portland Women's Theatre space. This is the company's second production and its second Deemer play: Its first was ``Christmas at the Juniper Tavern'' last December.

The play has serious points to make: about the advisability of keeping one's sexual preference secret (equally good arguments can be made either way), about the effect politics and society have on psychology, about the education of the playwright. But Deemer slips these in almost subliminally. The plot and frequent laughs bubble along so merrily that ``The Half-Life Conspiracy'' never seems didactic.

The narrative is too complicated to go into in depth. The plotline focuses on Cynthia (Virginia Belt), the director of the mythical Portland Community Players, and Ann (Sydne McKennie), a lesbian couple who are in the middle of a dispute over whether they should declare their relationship and therefore their sexual preference or not. As Deemer has updated the play, the anti-gay rights initiative Ballot Measure 13 provides a backdrop.

Into this argument walks Robert Olson (Jason Yurgel), or Todd Westlake, as he is also known. Olson is a pseudonym that Westlake affected to win a Community Players new play contest. Olson also happens to be Cynthia's ex-husband. His play is about a woman who is about to run off with another woman and leave her husband behind on the eve of a nuclear war. This is where Seattle is vaporized.

If the play has a weakness, it's that Olson's smugness gets a bit tiresome. Yurgel has a strong stage personality, and even a little smug goes a long way. Belt is accurately brittle and tense playing a character who wants to keep her sexuality private. And McKennie makes a winning Ann, courageous and funny. Aimee Swartz provides an amusing love interest for all three men in the play -- Olson, and community player actors Joe Barge (Frank Woodman) and Bill Stevens (John Gamble) -- as well as for Ann in the play-within-a-play.

See how complicated this all starts to become?

Director Diana Callihan manages to keep it all transparent on stage -- no mean feat. And given the technical limitations of the space, things move along relatively smoothly.

Edition: FOURTH
Section: ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Page: E04
Index Terms: Theater Review
Copyright (c) 1995 Oregonian Publishing Co.
Record Number: 9504110320

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