STAGE REVIEW : ‘ORPHANS’: A LOOK AT LOVE, POWER

There are those who might still quibble with the credibility of Lyle Kessler’s “Orphans” and make points, but, in the long run, it would be an empty victory. Do you look for logic in Pinter?

Kessler’s play, which originated in 1983 at L.A.’s Matrix Theatre (where so many good things seem to start), is not Pinter, but it has a similar ambiance of mild anguish.

Since 1983 “Orphans” has successfully journeyed to Chicago and New York. It has now opened at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage, showing signs of good work by Kessler. Director Robert Berlinger has also cast and staged the play well. Loopholes in the plot? Many remain, but they seem to matter less.

“Orphans” purports to show us the power of love on stunted lives. Two brothers are surviving alone in a dingy row house in North Philadelphia after their mother has died. The older one, Treat (Dan Shor), picks pockets for a living--and to keep the younger one, Philip (Chuck LaFont), in mayonnaise and tuna. Affable Philip spends most of his time hiding in their late mother’s closet.

Into this uncommon household, Treat brings Harold (Jonathan McMurtry), a slick guy with money whom he’s picked up in a bar. Harold is an orphan who likes the Dead End Kids and who takes a shine to Treat because he behaves like one. What Treat wants is Harold’s money, perhaps even a ransom. What he gets is entirely different. Call it an awakening.

Deprived of parental love himself, Harold seems to have a preternatural understanding of these young men’s emotional starvation. He has an almost mystical effect on them--disturbing to Treat, soothing and stimulating to Philip.

It’s not just a matter of settling in and getting the boys to clean the place up. Harold goes about the business of changing their lives.

Plot is not the issue and a lot of questions could be asked (and have been) about its fine points. (If Harold is hiding out, for instance, why will no one pay his ransom?)

The truer issue is the galvanizing power for change that “a little encouragement” has on these wild creatures. Something is forever altered and forever healed in them by the care and firmness Harold dispenses along with the use of his American Express card.

The boys are subtly and gradually transformed, with Philip gaining self-assurance where Treat begins to doubt himself, and both of them becoming at once stronger and more fragile by, unwittingly at first, opening themselves up to this stranger’s benevolent control.

Does it stretch credibility? The synchro-meshed performances at the Carter make us extremely willing to suspend disbelief. LaFont and especially Shor display a pervasive vulnerability under all the tough talk and untamed behavior, and McMurtry’s Harold comes across as seamy as well as smart--a street tough himself, grown up without rudder into a sort of fundamentally kind if unpolished man. He sees his own reflection in those boys and wants to do for them what no one did for him.

In the end, we are quite deeply moved, which attests to the power of Kessler’s writing and to Berlinger’s sensitive direction.

“Orphans” may not be a great play, but it’s a remarkably suspenseful and touching one, which, amid all of its hell-raising, has a profoundly theatrical, profoundly moral message to impart.

Alan K. Okazaki has created a functional setting (that goes from derelict to distinguished) in the Carter’s small central space and Christina Haatainen’s costumes make the appropriate comments on the persons who inhabit them, providing proper support for one of the Globe’s stronger productions.

‘ORPHANS’

A play by Lyle Kessler presented by the San Diego Old Globe at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage. Director by Robert Berlinger. Sets Alan K Okazaki. Lighting John B. Forbes. Costumes Christina Haatainen. Fight choreography Steven Pearson. Sound design Corey L. Fayman. Stage manager Diane F. DiVita. Cast Chuck LaFont, Dan Shor, Jonathan McMurtry. Performances run Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays 7 p.m. with matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. until Jan. 11 (619-239-2255).