STAGE REVIEW : North Coast’s Production of Play ‘Joe Egg’ Scrambled

Last year, when the daughter of 92-year-old Anna Hirth of La Mesa petitioned the courts to allow the removal of the feeding tube keeping her comatose mother alive, the moral questions warring in “right to die” issues--increasingly a subject of debate nationwide--came home to San Diego County.

The daughter, Helen Gary of Calabasas Park, argued that her mother’s dignity was being eroded by the artificial continuation of a hopelessly incapacitated existence while Hirth’s doctor, Allen Jay, maintained that medical people should not be forced to take a step likely to result in a patient’s death.

As right-to-life groups marched outside Hirth’s La Mesa nursing home, right-to-die advocate Richard Scott persuaded Superior Court Judge Milton Milkes to permit the removal of the tube. After Jay continued to refuse to remove the tube, Hirth was transferred to another institution in May, where she died after a week.

Into this heated moral arena steps the current revival of “Joe Egg,” playing at the North Coast Repertory Theatre through Feb. 14. The play was first produced 20 years ago and has never been more relevant: It is about a couple whose marriage is pulled apart by the strain of caring for their 10-year-old daughter, who has been like a vegetable since birth.

Unfortunately, the play itself is a difficult and unwieldy structure that, under Andrew Barnicle’s usually fine direction, does not bring the issues home.

Part of the problem is the self-conscious theatricality of a piece that would have been more touching if it had been more real. In “Joe Egg,” characters spend more time talking to the audience than to each other. In these monologues, they tell what is never adequately shown. And when they do communicate with others, as when Sheila and Bri, the parents, tell their friends about their history with daughter Josephine, they do so play-acting a series of parts--doctors, specialist, spiritual adviser--with a cleverness that lacks the immediacy of emotional directness.

Perhaps these inherent problems could have been turned to advantage if there was a raw intensity of feeling that made the skits and asides work as life-saving deflections of direct and unbearable pain. But the dark undertow that should embellish the surface action is but fleetingly visible. And even the surface action suffers from a lack of sparks among the cast members generally, and particularly between Dana Hooley and David Macy-Beckwith as the tormented married pair.

The result is a bloodless target in which arrows are shot at schematically drawn issues we are told that we are supposed to care about. But the arrows never pierce the heart.

The best of all the performances, curiously enough, is given by the one who has the least to do--United States International University student Michele Aimee Moore as the daughter. With her glazed eyes, twisted limbs, and her head lolling back uncomfortably in the wheelchair, she is the most real thing on the North Coast stage. While Macy-Beckwith does a valiant job as Bri, the too-clever adult who does not wish to grow up, his work is undercut by Hooley, who emotes histrionics rather than passion in the crucial role of his wife.

The dependable Susan Herder here provides a refreshing breath of credibility as Pamela, the friend who is hoping to be spared a glimpse of “too much reality.” In contrast, the acting gears of newcomer Gregory Beron, as her husband, Freddie, who believes in the right-to-life issue, creak all too loudly. Wendy Cullum offers a nicely charged portrayal of Bri’s busybody mother; however, here the actress is burdened by the task of breathing life into the caricature whom we are asked to believe is responsible for her son’s selfishness.

The setting of the play, too, is a serving platter of disappointments. Ocie Robinson’s living room never loses its artificiality, less on its own merits than on a lack of convincing interaction between the actors and their surroundings. The lighting by Barnicle and Robinson is jerky where it should move smoothly between the monologues and the general action, and Sara Barnicle’s costumes range from the drab to the unevocative.

“Joe Egg” is, from beginning to end, a sad story about a sad subject. Ultimately, however, the saddest thing about this production is that in its failure to be emotionally engaging, the tedium of its delivery may serve to reduce interest in this very important topic, rather than increase it.

“JOE EGG” By Peter Nichols. Director is Andrew Barnicle. Set by Ocie Robinson. Lighting by Andrew Barnicle and Ocie Robinson. Sound by Lawrence Czoka. Costumes by Sara Barnicle. With David Macy-Beckwith, Dana Hooley, Michele Aimee Moore, Susan Herder, Gregory Beron and Wendy Cullum. At 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays with Sunday matinees at 2 through Feb. 14, and 7 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 7. At the North Coast Repertory Theatre, 971A Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach.