‘Grace’: More Than a Happy Medium

Grace Tanner is a 60-year-old Georgia psychic transplanted to Southern California in Sandra Deer’s “Amazing Grace,” opening Thursday at the Back Alley.

“Grace is a very funny, spirited country woman who hasn’t had any training in the metaphysical or supernatural,” the playwright said. “She grew up on a farm, is plain-spoken, rough-edged. The story is about the effect Grace has on two people, both skeptics: an actress who’s bought the right to Grace’s life and is planning to do a movie on her--and a black policeman who asks her to investigate the cases of some missing children.

“The play doesn’t require you to believe in psychic powers. It’s really about the quality of healing and creating your own reality, things that Grace exemplifies.”

Deer--whose own stand on psychic phenomena is that of “not necessarily a believer, though I don’t disbelieve”--believes the work is really a paean to all things possible: “There’s so much power and knowledge in the world that (most people) don’t know of. I’m open to it all, fascinated by it. But when I started doing research on the play, there wasn’t so much New Age material around. Now it’s very fashionable.”

Allan Miller directs.

On Thursday, storyteller-musician Robin Williamson touches down at the Wallenboyd for four nights in his one-man “Songs and Stories Original and Traditional.”

“During the ‘60s, I was a member of (the folk group) the Incredible String Band,” said the Welsh-born performer. “We played all kinds of styles: Indian, African. But then I started to become influenced by my own heritage.” Another important influence was the writing of Jack Kerouac--”that sense of spontaneous vision, and also the sense of what’s gone before.” The resulting work is a literary-musical repertoire that includes pieces for the harp, small pipes, guitar and cittern.

Williamson, who is in the midst of a 6-week national tour of the show, divides his time between Los Angeles, where he has kept a home for 10 years (“I’m an overly uprooted person, so I feel quite at home here”) and Cardiff, Wales. There he is looking forward to a summer production of his music-and-dance “Merlin” by the Moving Being Theatre (with whom he previously collaborated on pieces about Dylan Thomas and Celtic mythology). Currently, Williamson is represented in the score of the just-released George Lucas-Ron Howard film “Willow.”

Next door at the Boyd St. Theatre, the Open Gate Theatre’s music-theatre-dance piece “Seeds” features Will Salmon’s “Scenes from the Odyssey” and Betty Nash’s “Awakening II,” playing through Saturday.

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Czech clown Boleslav Polivka breaks the fourth wall--and then some--in his “The Jester and the Queen” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

From The Times’ Sylvie Drake: “It’s lunacy--barely recognizable, tinged with an East European sensibility, but skillful and subtle. It’s also mixed in with some metaphysical meanderings that keep you in your seat even when they’re not that funny, and that have you coming back after intermission.”

Said Kim Mitchell in Daily Variety: “Polivka’s journey through the realm of autorske divaldo --author’s theater--incorporates mime, puppetry, songs, and juxtaposition of imagery. . . . The show operates on several levels, combining a Middle Ages gallows humor with modern satire on the contradictions of power and of being.”

Drama-Logue’s Polly Warfield was likewise enchanted: “One doesn’t get to be the Queen’s favorite jester by being dull, dumb or dreary. In ragbag cap and bells, Polivka, sporting a wristwatch and headgear fashioned from red panty hose, is never for a moment any of those. At all times, he’s a sunny imp and a nonpareil jester.”

Said Giselle Benatar in the Herald-Examiner: “A master of performance art, Polivka incorporates both modern and medieval techniques into a startling unconventional drama. The play proceeds swiftly from skillful exploration of mime and puppetry to comic experimentations with dramatic convention.”