Los Angeles Festival : CHURCH SITE FOR ELIOT’S BECKET PLAY

Just in time for the Pope’s visit, the Fringe gives us a play about allegiance to God.

T. S. Eliot’s poetic drama on Archbishop Becket’s 12th-Century martyrdom, “Murder in the Cathedral,” is best performed in a church (it indeed opened in one, Canterbury Cathedral in 1935). And the vaulted Gothic ceilings of the 180-seat Shatto Chapel in the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles is an evocative “set” for this Commonwealth Theatre production.

Director James Howard Davis gives us Gregorian chants, organ music, a chorus of eight women wailing Eliot’s verse along the narrow walls of the chapel. King Henry’s murderous knights pound on high doors, the chancel becomes the stage and Becket’s white and gold berobed corpse is carried shoulder-high down the center aisle.

Beware, though. This is a church, not a theater. Sightlines and acoustics are mediocre. Six of the eight young women, playing low-class Canterbury “scrubbers and sweepers,” are largely unintelligible. Only actresses Lisa Andresen and Karen Coles speak with clear diction.

Diction is also the strength of Steffen Lawrence’s noble Thomas Becket, whose break with Henry II over the separation of church and state cost him his life. But we never get inside this Becket, which is partly due to Eliot’s language (its stresses and assonance). Critics loved this play’s purity. But, for dramatic conflict, both Anouilh and Tennyson’s “Becket” plays (which at least dramatized King Henry) are less austere and more accessible.

Greg Besnak and Don Woodruff (the latter credited with the fine costumes) create gritty tempter/knight figures--especially gripping when they step at the end into our time frame to defend their 800-year-old murder in the cathedral.

Performances are at 540 S. Commonwealth Ave., Friday through Sunday, 8 p.m., through Oct. 11. Suggested donation: $5. (213) 385-1341.