THEATER REVIEW : RED RYDER’S ‘HEART’ LOSES THE BEAT

Strictly speaking, you don’t have to have seen “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?” to understand Mark Medoff’s sequel, “The Heart Outright,” playing at the Bowery Theatre through Sept. 27.

It helps, however. And, at the same time, the contrast hurts.

Oh, there’s a good play in “The Heart Outright.” But it has not yet fully emerged. While “Ryder” pulsates with raw, writhing and utterly exposed truths, “Heart” smothers under blankets of restraint and philosophy.

It’s the difference between a finished sculpture and one still roughly suggested from the marble.

The crux of the problem lies in a static first act in which Ryder, eight years after the traumatic events of the first play (in which he and several others were held hostage and bullied by a lunatic), finds himself running a pornographic movie house. In the course of an hour’s soliloquy, Ryder philosophizes about everything from the problem with modern movies to female degradation by insecure males to the need for belief in something greater than oneself.

What he has to say is consistently interesting and provocative. What it isn’t is sufficient to bring his character to life. The first Ryder was an angry young man, a negative force who was given a positive force, Angel Childress, early on to ignite the action. This older Ryder is an iceman--a cold, frighteningly passionless creature--who needs even more to be limned in Angel’s contrasting presence.

In “Heart,” Ryder doesn’t get his Angel until well into the second act, set four years after the first, when he is waiting at the bus station. Not until then does the play truly begin to click into gear.

So much is affecting in that second act that it is tempting to wish that the play began there, with the essential thoughts from the first act worked somehow into the dialogue.

The first thing that commands attention is the occasion--the day of Ryder’s mother’s funeral. Then there is the setting--a forlorn looking bus station, a gray chipped way station in Ryder’s quintessentially American odyssey, poignantly designed by Jim Billings. And shining like the most powerful of J.A. Roth’s well-used lights is an outright luminous performance by Ginny-Lynn Safford as Angel.

It is not that the other performances aren’t good; the characters, as written, don’t quite ring true. Joe Powers is solid as the mature Ryder but his terrible quietness is never convincingly explained, even by the reasons for self-hatred that he gives at the end.

George Chambers is the very picture of slime as Ryder’s worthless stepfather, Ray, but that makes his ultimate retreat hard to buy. Michael Lindsay plays the crazed, confused bus station manager, Dickie Turpin, with an eye-popping energy that does everything but succeed in finding a center that makes this walking explosive make sense.

In contrast, Safford’s Angel is so compellingly drawn and executed that she hovers over the action like a character that is almost mythically real. Her sad, sweet smiles alone are enough to invest these shadows with life--even if only in her presence.

In the Bowery’s recently closed “Ryder,” Rosemary Tyrrell did a touching job as the young Angel. Safford seems to have tapped into the spirit of her work and, adding the natural growth and wisdom of time to Tyrrell’s interpretation, brings the already created character seamlessly into bloom.

The show is enhanced by the effective sound and plaintive composition of Lawrence Czoka and the appropriate costumes by John-Bryan Davis.

Kim McCallum has directed sensitively, with great respect for the power of the messages Medoff here struggles to convey: the need to take as well as give, to forgive and have faith, to keep trying for that ever-elusive understanding between men and women (there’s a wonderful line of Angel’s in which she wishes there was another opposite sex besides men).

One of the chief differences between “Red Ryder” and “The Heart Outright” is that in “Ryder,” Medoff succeeded in showing what in “Heart” he is trying, less successfully, to tell.

While Medoff’s reach in this play far exceeds the attempts of the angry young playwright of “Ryder,” his grasp falls correspondingly shorter. This new vein he is tapping into is so rich, however, that one hopes he will not cease exploring it.

“THE HEART OUTRIGHT” By Mark Medoff. Director is Kim McCallum. Set by Jim Billings. Lighting by J.A. Roth. Sound by Lawrence Czoka. Costumes by John-Bryan Davis. Stage manager is Kathy Hansen. With Joe Powers, Michael Lindsey, Ginny-Lynn Safford and George Chambers. At 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday through Sept. 27. At the Bowery Theatre, 480 Elm St., San Diego.