STAGE REVIEW : A LOOK AT YEARS OF MARRIED SILENCE IN ‘THE PETITION’

Brian Clark’s “The Petition” deals with a simple subject: the relations between a man and a woman married for more than 50 years who only discover who they really are at that late stage of their relationship.

Commonplace? Perhaps. Simple? Hardly.

Clark (who earlier wrote the better-known “Whose Life Is It Anyway?”) has a few surprises up his sleeve. We won’t give them away (some secrets need to be kept), yet for all of its upper-crust British urbanity and restraint, this slow-starting two-character exchange now at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage in Balboa Park, is less genteel than it at first appears.

Retired General Sir Edmund Milne (G Wood) and his wife, Elizabeth (Priscilla Morrill), are spending a quiet morning at home before he trundles off to his weekly bridge game. He’s reading the newspaper and becoming increasingly agitated over its contents. She’s doing needlepoint and politely suggesting that he should calm down.

Is this a picture of negotiated marital peace? On the face of it, yes. But this is also a play, and we know that something must happen to upset the quiet. Not much does, by way of real action, but there is the small matter of an anti-nuclear petition published in the paper--the very item that has put the conservative general into such a bother. The item unleashes a collection of quite extraordinary revelations. That’s where the play truly begins and, from that moment on, it becomes a fascinating little study in the unraveling of two lives and the skill we have in keeping our true identities and thoughts concealed even from the people (especially from them?) we are supposedly closest to.

As with any play, it is not so much what is traded as how. Clark is a skillful wordmonger who knows how to keep transactions lively. (Says she: “Jerry is too much of a gentleman.” Says he: “I would have preferred it if you had said you were too much of a lady.” Says she: “But we both know that wouldn’t be true.”)

Clever dialogue, however, does not a play make. A real play needs insights and Clark vividly provides them with characteristic restraint at first, but then with a quickening pace. In the end we discover that these controlled, seemingly even foolish people are indeed capable of temperament and even passion.

More importantly, we also discover that they have lived as almost perfect strangers in a seem

ing tranquility that belied inner turmoil, great fundamental differences and secrets less than well kept. These become the fulcrum of the play. They emerge not so much to haunt the combatants as to radicalize the balance of power between them--first in her favor and then in his. Yet the facts as they unfold are so gingerly posited, so carefully wrapped in the trappings of gentility that each new point made is hard-won territory.

In this living-room confessional it is more a question of discovering the hitherto unknown geography of the opposing flank and embracing it than it is the winning or losing of battles. We know life has no victors--only, in this case, honorable players.

Dramaturgically, however, undiluted honor and nobility play only moderately well. For all its delicacy and civility, Clark’s play ultimately suffers a bit from its excessive rectitude. But director David Hay has taken care to stage it with minimal sentimentality and the author could hardly have asked for more perceptive interpreters than Wood and Morrill. (Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn did this play in New York and must have been wonders in it as well.)

Morrill brings to Elizabeth a flinty graciousness buoyed by great intelligence; Wood, with his human tuba of a voice, has the requisite bluster of the old general, but also the aching humanity behind the attitudes.

Fred M. Duer’s setting exhibits a peculiarly British knack for comfortable opulence, warmly complemented by John B. Forbes lights. Performances in Balboa Park continue Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays at 7 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. until March 8 (619) 239-2255).