STAGE REVIEW : A Melodramatic ‘Bloody Poetry’ Dwells on Shelley and Byron

The Living Edge Theater Company likes to live close to the edge and displayed both imagination and ambition when it undertook a production of British playwright Howard Brenton’s “Bloody Poetry” as part of last fall’s Fringe Festival.

A revival of the production in association with A Directors’ Theatre at the Lex shows it to be unfortunately victimized by two factors: Brenton’s unsatisfying play, which focuses chiefly and at too great a length on the eccentricities of those exotic nightingales, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron--and the unseasoned Living Edge company, whose reach considerably exceeds its grasp.

Brenton has wrought, or rather overwrought, a melodramatic conceit full of the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction intrigue and flamboyance that accompanied the facts of Shelley’s and Byron’s desperately entangled love lives. Rather than have the actors restrain the play’s full-blown romanticism, director Christian Barcellos appears to have encouraged them to flow freely with its self-indulgent and excessive neurotic ruminations.

At least that’s what they do.

Except for Mark Tymchyshyn’s articulate Byron, the men generally fare worse than the women, especially Marguerite MacIntyre’s lucid and well-spoken Mary Shelley and, to an only slightly lesser degree, Elisabeth Bartlett’s Claire Clairemont. Shannon Nelson is a little too tortured as Harriet Westbrook (and as Harriet’s ghost) and Charlie Phillips is bland as the sketchy Polidori.

Most troubling and problematic of all is Guy Massey’s cotton-mouthed Shelley who, in the central role, tries to make up in a postured and enervating intensity what he lacks in verbal clarity. Get thee to a speech coach, go.

Robert W. Zentis designed the atmospheric lighting and unfurnished, pointillistic set (very taxing on the eyes). The period costumes by Elisabeth Scott are fine.

Performances at 6760 Lexington Ave. in Hollywood run Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., until March 27. Tickets: $10-$12; (213) 939-9459.