AT SOUTH COAST REPERTORY : LIFE, DEATH IN A ‘COLD SWEAT’

I don’t want people to be afraid of death because then they stop living. --”Cold Sweat”

There is a play--perhaps a good one--in Neal Bell’s “Cold Sweat,” but the author needs more time to shape it.

It’s also possible that he needs more time to find it. At the moment, in the production that has opened on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, one is pushed and pulled--engrossed and distanced by the subject matter, the writing and the rambling.

The subject matter is death in all of its mystery and some of its vulgarity. Considering the scope of the undertaking, a less interesting playwright would have lost us somewhere in Act I. Not Bell, who loses us only in Act II. Like it or not, he is fundamentally a poet and his writing, even when it is self-conscious (which it often is), even when it feels stagy (which it often does), gnaws at the mind, throwing it slightly off base as it listens for the next oblique thought indirectly transmitted by clever dialogue.

And that is not Bell’s only impudence. In this examination of thanatology, he has gone for the root word, thanatos, exploring and exploiting the fullness of its possibilities. Bell depicts experiences he has never had--such as death by war (in this case, Vietnam, where he never was) and by lingering illness (cancer at all its stages).

Dangerous, appropriate stuff.

Through his clear-eyed protagonist, Dr. Alice Franklin (Karen Hensel), who has to climb over the body of her dead lover in a Vietnam clearing in order to save herself (and has to deal with the elation she feels at her own survival), Bell takes us on a pilgrimage away from the inadequacy of scientific explanations of death into the deeper (but more tolerated) inadequacy of occult attempts at explanations.

For a while we go along, hoping for revelations. What ultimately undoes the play is not the absence of answers, but the absence of any new insights.

Still, the journey is not without rewards, largely because Bell is an intelligent, quick-witted writer who makes his characters, both living and dying, people worth listening to--even when the theatricality of his wit seriously impairs our ability to suspend disbelief.

In her thirst to examine psychic and other phenomena surrounding the dead and dying, Alice, aided by a sometime tag-along secretary with waning psychic powers (Anni Long), confronts a number of fellow travelers: the ghost of her Vietnam lover (Michael Canavan); the ghost of another Vietnam medical colleague (Hubert Baron Kelly Jr.); her cancerous father (Jack Axelrod); her suicidal mother (Ann Siena-Schwartz); Emma, a terminal patient whose debility does not diminish by one jot her blistering cynicism (Mary Anne McGarry); Emma’s estranged husband, a charlatan or healer (Tom Ligon), --and Leon (Richard Doyle), a new lover pleading to be loved not for his lymphosarcoma but for his “being alive.”

If it sounds like a crowded field, it is. Too crowded and, in many ways, too pat. Brisk exchanges such as “Do you mind if I smoke?”--”I don’t care if you burn to a crisp” give way to more calculated snarls such as, from Emma, speaking of her husband: “I think I’m about to die; he thinks there’s no death, which has us at odds.”

This capacity for a dry, muscular humor is Bell’s attraction and downfall. We stay with him well after the play has stopped deluding us about fulfilling its promise because the language insists we listen. And his actors know how to make the dialogue--if not always the situation--pay off.

Hensel’s obsessed Alice is at once intense and restrained. Siena-Schwartz is a bit bloodless as the mother and McGarry almost too splendidly wry as the semi-comatose Emma, but all are talented enough and well directed enough (by David Emmes) to give us the most straightforward and unsentimental reading of this play.

Bell has a special sense of timing, too. “Alice is like a skull that you keep on the desk,” says her father at the very moment we have begun to think so. “Why don’t you find a man in some sort of working order,” he urges, “close to his mortal imperfections, and cleave . . . “

After 2 1/2 hours of soul-searching and assorted scourings, it sounds like smart advice.

So what starts out stilted but clear in the jungles of Vietnam, enters the twilight zone and loses its way in another jungle: a maze of clever lines, muddy goals and considerable repetition in the more familiar but still stilted territory of bed, living and hospital rooms.

If Bell can make his play leaner and less stagy, he might achieve one very worthwhile objective: to bring us into, and keep us in, closer touch with our own mortality.

Production values (a spare, block set by Michael Devine, costumes by Nicole Morin and lighting by Peter Maradudin) are understated. Jim Rohrig’s original compositions weave a singular melancholic thread through the play.

Performances at 655 Town Center Drive run Tuesdays through Fridays at 8:30 p.m., Saturdays at 3 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays at 3 and 8 p.m., until April 12. Tickets $18-$23 (714) 957-4033.