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STAGE REVIEW : ‘The Wake’s’ a Play That Deserves to Be Put to Rest : SAN DIEGO COUNTY

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“Love and death, that’s really all I ever think about,” Beth Henley said in a recent interview with The Times.

Make that love and death seen through the eyes of quirky, sometimes repressed, depressed or wildly uninhibited characters in “Crimes of the Heart” and “The Miss Firecracker Contest.”

Make that more death than love as seen through the eyes of the characters in “The Wake of Jamie Foster,” playing at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre’s Hahn Cosmopolitan through July 23.

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That isn’t just death as in lying in a pine coffin as Jamie does right in the middle of the Foster family parlor. It’s death as in working in a stultifying bank job. Death as in living in a loveless marriage. Death as in feeling worthless with no hope.

Of course, this being a Henley play, even the ruminations on death are funny at times. And insightful. And healing. It’s all right to be angry at the dead, she seems to say. It’s all right to spill food, wear the wrong clothes, mourn in your own unconventional ways. An actress before she started writing, Henley knows how to write parts that actors can alternately use to steal a laugh, then draw a tear.

Part of what keeps “The Wake” from being a tragedy is that, rather like Poor Jud in “Oklahoma,” nobody seemed to like Jamie Foster--not even his family.

Foster’s widow, Marshael (Donna Walker), still has not forgiven him for walking out on their unhappy marriage a few months before he was killed by being kicked in the head by a cow. His brother, Wayne Foster (Paul Eggington), trapped in a financially but not spiritually rewarding job, has not forgiven him for being his mother’s favorite. Marshael’s sister and brother, Collard and Leon, just seem to have disliked him on general principle.

In a way, Foster conjures memories of the never-seen politico husband who got shot in Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart.” He’s so despicable that pity seems inappropriate. Except in “Crimes,” the husband recovers. Here, there is a nagging sense that he’s dead because the playwright thought that someone that bad ought to be dead. There’s an uncomfortable scent of vengeance about the proceedings.

Director Will Simpson guides a skillful cast through the twists and turns of a circuitous script only to reveal that sparkle alone can’t disguise the fact that there is nowhere to go.

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The play, like its dead hero, has some fatal flaws--a lack of focus and a lack of a burning question to drive the action.

The play feels as if it ought to belong to the widow, but exquisite as Donna Walker is as the depressed Marshael, the writing does not stay on her. As if nervous about focusing on a depressed character, Henley seems to hedge her bits by drifting to livelier people, even if their stories are not quite related to what’s going on.

But the worst crime here is that nothing much happens. In “Miss Firecracker,” we wonder if Carnelle will win or lose the contest, if Elaine will go back to her husband, if Popeye will get Delmount and if Delmount will sell the house. In “Crimes,” we wonder why Babe shot her husband and why Lenny turned down her only beau and if Meg will get something going with her old flame Doc again.

“The Big Chill” may have generated a story on the basis of a reunion over a dead body, but even that movie posed the question of whether people who had achieved closeness in an era as dead as their deceased friend, could find closeness again.

The characters in “The Wake of Jamie Foster” were never close. There are no burning questions or resolutions. There is charm personified in Pixrose Wilson, played like a true pixie by Gabrielle Sinclair--who tells of her lifelong travails at the hands of arsonists with such cheer. There is the irresistible fatality Ann Dauber brings to Collard, portraying her as a lovely, long-legged accident about to happen.

Louis Seitchik brings depth, if not age to the role of Marshael’s wizened old suitor, Brocker Slade. David Grant Wright is the quintessential pixie-mate to Pixrose (quite a leap from his last role at the Hahn as the threatening Cowboy in “I’m Not Rappaport.”) Paul Eggington and Rebecca Nachison are well-matched as the up-tight Wayne and (appropriately named) ‘Katty’ Foster.

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Robert Earl creates a smashing, split-level structure for the house and then lays down a triangular strip of green fabric to represent the yard outside. No matter how you cut it, it is too hard to buy someone trying to scale the outside wall to a bedroom when he’s just inches from the staircase that leads to that same bedroom.

It’s part of the essential confusion that keeps the several stories here from jelling into a play. Some of the fragments, like the widow’s speech to the body, are quite beautiful and some, like Collard’s comparison of a dead fetus to a bucket of fried chicken, are unforgivably awful.

But the greatest cause for mourning in this wake is that not all the fine work on stage or off, by the fine GQT designers (Catherine L. Meacham on costumes, Matthew Cubitto, lighting and Lawrence Czoka, sound), can pull the fragments together into a cohesive whole.

‘THE WAKE OF JAMIE FOSTER’

By Beth Henley. Director is Will Simpson. Sets by Robert Earl. Costumes by Catherine L. Meacham. Lighting by Matthew Cubitto. Sound by Lawrence Czoka. Stage manager is Lisa DeLoy Baker. With Donna Walker, David Grant Wright, Rebecca Nachison, Paul Eggington, Anne Dauber, Gabrielle Sinclair and Louis Seitchik. At 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday with a Sunday matinee at 2. At the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 4th Ave., San Diego.

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