THEATER REVIEW : ‘Walk Out of Water’ Comes on Strong at Hahn Theatre

Pulling laughter out of a story of a battered wife, her retarded son, ravaged daughter and blind mother, without compromising the innate dignity of those characters is no mean feat. But that is exactly what Donald Driver does in his remarkably touching and moving play, “A Walk Out of Water.”

The secret to Driver’s play, now in a West Coast premiere at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre through Aug. 27, is that his characters don’t feel sorry for themselves. If his three generations of a rural Oregon family seem helpless against the bullying forces of the world, their wit isn’t. They make jokes at their oppressors’ and their own expenses.

Blind Gramma Rin (Mary Boersma), a tippler, lashes at the church pressuring her to sell her land; if they are “born again,” she says, she thinks they did it better the first time. Ditto her kindred spirit, her granddaughter Jennie Mae (Lisa Guggenheim), who takes on the whole adult world at one fell swoop. These adults control everything, she complains: they have all the money and all the food and you can’t even run away because they have all the railroad tickets too.

The weakest part of “A Walk Out of Water” is the beginning, in which a tense dialogue between Gramma Rin and her daughter, Lettie, concerning Lettie’s boozing, bruising husband (Paul L. Nolan) sets up the expectation that this will be another formula you-must-change-your-life play.

It is not until Guggenheim’s charismatic entrance as Jennie Mae that we realize that this is Jennie Mae’s story and that more of the action turns upon her unique and winning coming of age than on anything else. That is when Jean Hauser’s fine direction kicks into high gear.

All the performances are good, but it is Guggenheim who drives the play and, in the process, makes everyone around her look just a little bit better. Not since Carson McCullers created Mick Kelly in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” has anyone written an adolescent girl with such a compelling and irresistible imagination.

Jennie Mae is indomitability personified. Her favorite game may be reenacting the sinking of the Titanic, which her mother acidly describes as being the story of their lives, but her ship goes down in style, with she and her half-brother, Little Lyle (Bryan Monroe), singing and wearing lacy flapper dresses from the 1920s over their jeans.

Boersma lends deceptively strong support as Gramma Rin. Without seeming to work very hard, she slowly builds up a finely etched portrait of a leathery old warrior. Hinton struggles more with the most self-pitying character in the play, Lettie. What makes her part tricky is that we do not get to see her grow. Her changes don’t come until after the play ends.

Nolan brings power but too much inner strength to the bullying confusion that should be Lettie’s red-neck husband Earl. Monroe is touching as Little Lyle, but plays him as withdrawn and slow rather than retarded.

The Gaslamp’s design team is beautifully in tune with the mood of the piece. Resident set designer Robert Earl has rarely used the Hahn space better as in this lived-in rendering of a two-story farmhouse, complete with tree, hanging tire swing, a line for the wash and a tool shed out back.

Matthew Cubitto bathed the look with a warm, natural-looking sky that evolves gracefully through the play’s long afternoon and night. And recent San Diego State graduate Stacey Rae designed the costumes with a keen understanding of the poignant contrast between the well-worn fabric of Jennie Mae’s everyday jeans--torn like her life--and the romantic clothes of yesteryear that are the stuff of her dreams.

The title of “A Walk Out of Water” is a revealing allusion to Jennie Mae’s hunch that when the first fish walked out on the land, the other fish probably beat him up. Still, the thing to remember is that that fish did survive to evolve into a human being. In that spirit, Jennie Mae takes a lot of beating without getting beaten. And that is what lends so much light to what would otherwise be a dark, dark play.

“A WALK OUT OF WATER”

By Donald Driver. Director is Jean Hauser. Lighting by Matthew Cubitto. Sound by John Hauser. Costumes by Stacey Rae. Stage manager is Lisa DeLoy Baker. With Mary Boersma, Lizabeth Hinton, Lisa Guggenheim, Bryan Monroe and Paul L. Nolan. At 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, with Sunday matinees at 2 through Aug. 27. At the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 4th Ave., San Diego.