STAGE REVIEW : ‘Once in Doubt’: Mutual Bondage at the Cast

Harry is an abstract expressionist painter obsessed with his work. Flo is the woman in his life obsessed with Harry. “Once in Doubt” is their wickedly funny danse macabre premiering at the Cast Theatre.

New York stage actor Raymond J. Barry, who both wrote this seriocomic collage of love and hate, and who plays the painter, has fashioned an insidious drama of a human relationship that sticks like blood on a white canvas.

In fact, as the artist’s ultimate act of self-expression, Harry early in the play slashes his wrist and smears a crimson blot from his arm in grand gestures on a wall-sized canvas, the invisible fourth wall of the stage. The blood is imaginary but real enough. Flo (Kim O’Kelley), sipping tea, looks on with contempt. She’s been through this before.

Harry hardly seems maimed but he does hold his arm stiffly for the rest of the play. Just as later he is forced to hobble around on the edges of his feet after deliberately jumping into a pile of broken glass.

Can this possibly be amusing? Or incisive? Yes, all of it. That’s partly because Barry (a veteran of the Open Theatre) is a gifted, visceral, comedic actor, full of danger, and partly because the physical and verbal dynamics rousingly unpeel layers of obsession.

The playwright Barry revels, like his protagonist artist, in dramatic license. There’s much overlapping dialogue with the painter directly talking to the audience while the woman argues with him in linear fashion. The color red, vividly imagined and later visualized, is the primitively apt metaphor, ironically splashed against bright white studio walls.

Here are two characters whose mutual bondage is both emotional and chemical. “I want to get inside your body,” the woman says. They kiss and you believe it.

His inner “truth,” uncoiled like a nasty seduction, is quintessential, scatological male id. Comically, they encircle one another like feral creatures whose weapons lurch from “verbal spears” to jarring slaps to the head (by her) and ankle gouging (by him).

The production is finely tuned. O’Kelley is a Furie, simmering with biting flare. Barry, costumed in a black T-shirt and faded demims, is a chameleon. And director David Saint’s staging enjoys a tension that seems to rise out of a jungle.

The lusts here are art and love that finally find a truce of sorts with the arrival of a third party. He’s a blue-collar stranger, come to check out the noise, played with cherubic geniality by Harvey Perr. His simplicity is deceptive, but his hosts are not naive either. They have plans for him.

It is here that the play turns into a three-way conspiracy of need and lust generated by whiskey and voyeurism and compromise. The guest even begins painting himself, throwing into bizarre relief the question of art itself.

And over on the side, the stage cloaked now in the glow of lighting designer Erika Bradberry’s anemic red light, Harry and Flo collapse into a bargain of negotiated needs.

At 800 N. El Centro Ave., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., through Feb. 26. Tickets: $12-$15. (213) 462-0265.