STAGE REVIEW : IN THIS CASE, ‘RITA’ DOES EDUCATING

Is education--the kind one gets from books--really the key to a better life?

Playwright Willy Russell has found a character who would stake her life on it--a bold and ambitious hairdresser, Rita, whose harsh, working-class way with the King’s English is not about to stop her “dead eager” pursuit of knowledge.

Rita bursts joyfully into the opportunity offered by an open university course in literature. With hair peroxided almost to the point of disintegration, skirts short and dreadfully selected, she practically explodes into the office of her assigned tutor--a burned-out, alcoholic professor and failed poet named Frank.

Rita overpowers him with her stronger life force, giving him no choice but to launch into a major overhaul of her deprived mind.

The playwright called this entertaining endeavor “Educating Rita”--a London stage success eventually repeated in a critically praised film (with Michael Caine and Julie Walters). Russell’s amusing twist on Shaw’s “Pygmalion” tradition opened last week at the North Coast Repertory Theatre, directed by Olive Blakistone.

Actress Ann Bowen-Davies is an English emigre whose recent debut at the Mission Playhouse prompted shivers of expectation over her next performance. She fully lives up to that promise as Rita.

Classically trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Bowen-Davies is nevertheless comfortable enough with Rita’s coarse accent to save this American production from the first threat of disaster. Where would the story of Eliza Doolittle be if she did not begin her transformation speaking in, as Rita would say, “dead awful” Cockney apostrophications?

But Rita is a do-it-herself Eliza. It is her dream to educate her way out of an empty life spent in pubs and hair salons and in endless dress-buying, attempts to fill the psychic vacancies with material comforts. She has no idea that her intelligence illumines Frank’s dreary office with a natural brilliance long absent from his academic dungeon.

She is vibrant, questioning, direct and witty. She nearly awakens Frank from his over-educated stupor with her refreshing viewpoints and stubborn, tenacious grip on the life she’s determined to build into the most satisfying completeness she can manage.

Bowen-Davies brings all this to the stage with exuberance and humor. Unfortunately, she so thoroughly eclipses John Mellor’s Frank that the two-character play ends up limping lopsidedly across the tiny North Coast stage. Only half of Russell’s thoughtful script is fully developed.

Extreme lighting problems (missed cues, faulty equipment), tacky wigs and costumes (apparently designed by no one but the actors themselves), props that stay fixed despite long passages of time, and shaky levels on the music between scenes add to the heavy side of the scale.

Barth Ballard’s design of the professor’s office works better than his lighting scheme, earning a nod for its use of real books, even if close observation of the titles slightly destroys the illusion. Sound designer Marvin Read’s piano selections are fine, but, as noted, seemed as thoughtlessly played as the radio on stage, which is heard from the back of the house.

Bowen-Davies’ shimmering performance and Russell’s insightful script are very good reasons to overlook the production’s flaws. But one does wonder why North Coast has slipped so far in its technical standards. A financial crisis? Lack of personnel?

Perhaps the most disappointing element is Mellor’s unsuitability for the role of Frank. To begin with, he is too young, the white spray on his longish brown locks and painted facial lines too obvious for a theater this intimate.

In trying to manage an appropriately “professorial” manner, the actor has adopted several phony affectations that work against him. These layers of falseness keep Frank trapped inside, unable to respond to the sustenance of Rita’s enthusiasm. Surprisingly, for an actor and actress who are in real life husband and wife, these two never connect on stage as they are meant to.

Perhaps that’s why a recent audience behaved as if it, too, were insulated from the drama on stage, talking loudly and rudely through every scene change, sometimes continuing their conversations after the lights were up.

Bowen-Davies’ skills were doubly proven by her ability to capture the laughter and interest of this unschooled crowd. Their rudeness proved Russell’s thesis that a ticket to the theater--”culture”--does not necessarily equate with the grace and style that Rita so hungers after.

“EDUCATING RITA”

By Willy Russell. Directed by Olive Blakistone. Set and lighting, Barth Ballard. Sound, Marvin Read. With John Mellor and Ann Bowen-Davies. Thursdays-Sundays, through July 27, at North Coast Repertory Theatre, 971A Lomas Santa Fe Dr., Solana Beach.