STAGE REVIEW : Peek at Modest Lives in ‘Jack’

You’ve heard this description before: the chronicle of a marriage. No, it’s not “The Fourposter” or “I Do! I Do!” We’re talking here of a Yorkshire coal miner and his wife in “Happy Jack,” a piece at the Coast Playhouse, every bit as jaunty as its title.

This play by John Godber (also responsible for “Bouncers” and “Shakers”) is not new, just new to us. Unlike its syncopated and raucously urbanized predecessors, “Happy Jack” is the soft-spoken diary of a countrified marriage gripped by the Industrial Revolution. We drop in on it page by page. The technique, however, is no different from that of “Bouncers” and “Shakers.”

The action is nonlinear and the actors speak of themselves alternately in the first and third persons. All that changes is the tone.

For coal miner Jack and wife Liz (played by real-life husband-and-wife John and Elizabeth Larroquette), it’s been a long, largely uneventful and contented life. They are people of limited words who have difficulty verbalizing their feelings, though you’d be surprised at how much they manage to express by indirection.

Jack is a big, complacent lunk of a man who writes furtive little poems about life in the mine shaft. Liz is a small, compulsive woman, given to bouts of depression, whose life is bounded by the walls of her house and her fears for Jack. It’s a simple--you might even say mole-like--existence, sparked here and there by a honeymoon trip to the sea or a Sunday walk up the hill. Not the stuff of great drama.

Indeed, the main--perhaps the only--reason to see “Happy Jack” is to bask in the level of grace and humor the Larroquettes bring to the relationship. Under the steady hand of director Ron Link (and in front of a more picturesque than functional set by Dorian Vernacchio and Deborah Raymond), they infuse a very small play with a lively and generous spirit.

For a scant 80 minutes, they beguile and seduce. What they can’t do, no matter how gamely they try (and they try), is make the play more than the modest acting exercise that it is. We’re talking philosophical stature. No matter how charming, tender and affectionate “Happy Jack” may be, it has specific limitations. The play is a loving portrait of upstanding folk. No more if no less.

One could hardly wish for a more engaging performance than that of the Larroquettes--big John with that boyish smile he’s so reluctant to crack; little Elizabeth with her feisty tongue and quick, angular movements. Plus the friendly bullying banter between them. But they can’t create what isn’t there.

Playwright Godber, either shrewdly or inadvertently, has latched onto a writing and playing style that is visually expressive but also good at covering up a certain analytical shallowness.

While it matters less in the more personalized concept of “Happy Jack,” it does explain the innate softness at the core of “Shakers” and even “Bouncers” that, for all their tough talk, have highly suspect credentials as so-called political plays. At least with this one we know where we stand: Outside the door, listening to two ordinary/extraordinary lives humming and ticking away.

At the Coast Playhouse, 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, Saturdays and Sundays at 8 p.m., through March 19. Tickets: $17.50; (213) 650-8507).