STAGE REVIEW : Pavlovsky’s New ‘Pablo’ Also a Different ‘Pablo’

Latin America, land of poet-diplomats (Carlos Fuentes), baseball pitchers-turned-dictators (Castro) and professors-become-guerrillas (Peru’s Shining Path), is a world of painful contradictions. Perhaps only in Argentina could there have been an Eva Peron, loved and hated by all.

Argentina’s Eduardo Pavlovsky is a playwright of just such contradictions. His “Pablo,” in a new English translation by director Paul Verdier, explores--impossible as it seems--the misery of joy and the pleasure of pain, and the results of this psycho-political bind.

Fresh from the First International New York Festival of the Arts where it was inaugurated, Verdier’s English-language production marks the return of “Pablo” to Stages, home of last year’s PAVLOVSKYfest. The triple bill of “Potestad,” “Camaralenta” and “Pablo” introduced this gifted dramatist to North America. “Pablo” (as well as “Potestad”) was then in Spanish, but Pavlovsky and his two other cast members transcended the language barriers with a brittle, brutal and comic performance.

It felt like great silent film acting, filtered through the lenses of spare black comedy and cathartic political theater. The new “Pablo,” for a number of reasons, is a different “Pablo.”

The third (female) character is now gone, as if the play has shifted from wide-angle to Telephoto. A good choice, for the play is really a duologue/dialectic between two men named L. (Hal Bokar) and V. (Tony Maggio) who are possessed by the absence of a mutual acquaintance named Pablo.

Pavlovsky’s art is now completely apparent, even with the always-understood dilemma of the original losing that ineluctable “something” in the translation. We can see (and hear) that L. is more than a father confessor figure to V.; he is as disturbed by the abstract but emotionally debilitating dislocation that V. is feeling. L.’s solution seems to be to remain in the present (listen to Bokar’s monologue on this for a master actor working his way through a dense, haunting tangle of language).

V. never arrives at a solution, forever split between the disorder “here” (the mind?) and the order “there” (Argentina?). The inconclusive dialectic is between the poisonous attraction of perfect order--the efficiency of fascism--and inescapable chaos--of democracy or human nature. Coursing through it all is Pablo, “disappeared” by the playwright as he was perhaps “disappeared” by the Argentine junta.

What is lost in the new staging is a certain edge of slapstick on one end of the spectrum (Pavlovsky shares Beckett’s taste for the comedy of isolated souls) and blinding terror on the other. Bokar patrols the entire emotional range like an eagle, but Maggio’s limits are all too exposed under the glare of such mature, epochal writing. It doesn’t help that Maggio slips in and out of accent. “Pablo” needs a twosome in absolute sync; the drama’s dissonance shouldn’t infect the playing.

Yet this is typically precision directing from Verdier, from his pacing and modulation between word torrents and silences, to his stage pictures that have the rich simplicity of fine woodcuts (Kevin Mahan did the stark lights).

Plays at 1540 N. McCadden Place, on Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 7 and 9 p.m., Sundays, 4 and 7 p.m., until Sept. 18. Tickets: $13-$15; (213) 465-1010.