STAGE REVIEW : SPOOFING AROUND IN ‘ROMANCE’

O pioneers! Peter Parnell’s “Romance Language” at the Mark Taper Forum has Walt Whitman heading out West with Huck Finn in search of Tom Sawyer, who has signed up with Gen. Custer to fight Injuns. Also on the road are Emily Dickinson (who has signed on with Charlotte Cushman’s Shakespearean company) and Louisa May Alcott (who, having failed to snag Henry David Thoreau, has become a gypsy dancer named Minnie Montez.)

That’s not the half of it: I haven’t mentioned the fascinating frontier hostess, Mme. Nash, who is really a man; or the climax at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where everybody gets killed; or their reunion in a star-spangled heaven. But you get the idea. This is a spoof of the national mythology that is also trying to say something halfway serious (and maybe more) about that mythology.

Just what it’s trying to say is hard to disentangle from the pageantry. It’s possible that Parnell couldn’t put his finger on it himself, except in a most general way. Something about the way that the American Dream is at once liberating and lethal--not only giving us permission to be all that we can be (as they say on the enlistment posters) but tempting us to believe that we can be absolutely anything at all, if we really put our minds to it.

Emerson (he’s here too, rolling around in a wheelchair) provides the play’s preface: “Build therefore your own world.” Carried to extreme, this is solipsism, and everybody in “Romance Language” is blind to anybody’s world but his own, from Thoreau (who wants to be a tree) to Custer (who intends to be President, once he has fumigated the West of savages.)

Pushed too hard, the American Dream is a psychosis, and that’s the point of the suicides and carnage at the end of the play. But that Parnell brings Walt and the gang back to life at the end shows how slow he is to give up on the dream. This is loyal of him, but it makes for a fairly soft ending--one that even borders, for all its protective irony, on being inspirational. Parnell takes a lot of risks in this play, but he doesn’t take the ultimate one. He doesn’t risk the audience’s dislike.

Particularly not at the Taper. This is the second production of the play; it was originally done last winter at Playwrights’ Horizons in New York. A look at the original script shows that Parnell has made an interesting change in the first scene, where Huck (Jon Matthews) appears at Walt’s window, rather like Peter Pan asking Wendy to come out and play.

In the first version Walt has a bedmate, a comrade from the streets. A startled Huck brains him with a frying pan, meaning no harm, and this precipitates Walt’s flight with the lad. The scene has both an action and a point of view. It says, out front, that one of the things it’s important to know about Walt is that he is homosexual. It also starts the two off with blood on their hands.

Here Walt (Dakin Matthews) is sleeping chastely alone, and he decides to join Huck on the grounds that it will be a sort of research mission into the nation’s unconscious. This makes the scene more abstract, more arbitrary and a lot less frank about what is to be a dominant theme in the play: the idea that pioneering in America extends to sexual matters.

Yet, Parnell doesn’t change the dressing-room scene where the actress Charlotte Cushman (Concetta Tomei) works her fascination on shy little Emily Dickinson (Valerie Mahaffey), just in from Amherst. It seems hard that the females in the play have to show their kinks, while Whitman goes back to being Good Gray Walt.

Doubtless, Parnell had sound artistic grounds for the revision, but his first choice was the more forthright one, and it’s hoped he’ll go back to it as the play evolves at the Taper.

It is obviously still doing that, to the extent that the management was nervous about having the production reviewed at the customary press preview on Wednesday night. (Apparently the play’s New York director, Sheldon Larry, has been replaced by Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre, which is co-producing the play with the Taper.) From our seat, it looked fine.

However, the Taper gives us a very good seat. The side view of Loren Sherman’s set could be problematic in the semicircular Taper. From head-on, though, this is a marvelous, ever-changing set, with playful pop-up elements that add a touch of a children’s book and rigging that puts us back in the world of the 19th-Century theater.

Sheila McLamb-Wilcoxes’ costumes are fanatically detailed and Martin Aronstein contributes a superbly evocative lighting scheme over the event. From the ripples of Walden Pond to the wide-open spaces of Injun country, we see it all, or think we do.

There’s good acting, too, in roles so skewed between reality and fantasy that the balance can’t have been easy. Walt, Henry David, Ralph Waldo (Kay E. Kuter) and hysterical Louisa May (Frances Conroy) are like some crazy game of Authors come to life, and Huck and Tom (Eric Schiff) could go into “Big River” tomorrow.

It was touch of genius to put little Billy Barty into the role of Louisa May’s possessive father, and he makes a funny cowpoke too. As Mme. Nash, Howard Shangraw certainly had me fooled, and Ben Siegler nicely conveys the baffled lust of her young suitor--Custer’s nephew. (John Vickery is Custer and Thoreau, accounting for Louisa May’s attraction to them both.)

“Romance Language” is a mishmash, but it has energy, ambition and ideas. What it needs is a clearer sense of what it wants to say and less anxiety about beguiling its audience. To borrow a phrase from Ralph Waldo, it needs more self-reliance. Let’s see if it takes this opportunity to grow up.

‘ROMANCE LANGUAGE’ Peter Parnell’s play, at the Mark Taper Forum, co-produced with the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego. Director Sheldon Larry. Costumes Sheila McLamb-Wilcox. Lighting Martin Aronstein. Incidental music Conrad Susa. Sound Jon Gottlieb, Scott Lehrer. Fight choreography Anthony De Longis. Production stage manager Richard Winnie. Stage manager Tami Toon. Assistant stage manager Al Franklin. With Dakin Matthews, Jon Matthews, Carl Weintraub, Frances Conroy, Kevin Gray, Billy Barty, Concetta Tomei, Jacque Lynn Colton , Howard Shangraw, Ben Siegler, Valerie Mahaffey, Kay E. Kuter, John Vickery, Eric Schiff, Randolph Dreyfuss, Gregory Michaels, Scott Birmingham, Timothy Dang, Matthew Dunn, Lynne Griffin, H. David Gunderman, Rion Hunter , Miguel Marcott, Richardson Morse, Dan Speaker, Robert S. Telford. Plays Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m. Tickets $17.50-$23.50. Closes March 9. The Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. (213) 972-7211.