STAGE REVIEW : Big Kitchen ‘Counts the Ways’ That Albee Can Make Love Falter

Marriage, Edward Albee style (for those who recall “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”), is usually a less than amorous exchange in which both partners promise to pummel until death do they part.

How refreshing it is then to open a window on Albee’s “Counting the Ways,” an Eisler Project production at the Big Kitchen through Sunday. It tells the vulnerable tale of a couple’s life together as seen through more than a dozen swiftly paced vignettes of kitchen conversation.

Which is not to say that “Counting the Ways” is romantic. No, despite its reference to the Elizabeth Barrett Browning powerful paean to love that begins “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” this one-hour play uses the poem to counterpoint the infinitely ordinary ways love can falter and fail.

The power of the work, under John Highkin’s sensitive direction, stems from the insistent sub-text of yearning that keeps failure from foundering into cynicism.

“Do you love me?” the character named She (Dana Case) asks the character named He (Eric Grischkat) over the years. “Of course,” he says in the beginning, rolling his eyes and burrowing back into his morning newspaper.

“Of course,” he says with more of a leering growl, during the erotic years.

“Of course,” he says, years after separate beds replaced their single bed, hesitating to answer after she tells him she burned the creme brulee .

“Of course,” he says with mixed but real feeling after all the compromises and lies and disappointments and dried-up dreams come home to rest.

It is not easy to humanize roles that the playwright himself has labeled He and She. But Grischkat and Case pull off the job with touching urgency. They bypass the easy choices for a realization of two complex, but yearning hearts that keep, despite the best of intentions, misunderstanding each other 99% of the time.

The story is aided, oddly enough, by the unusual setting in the 24-seat dining area. Highkin has even found a way to make the limits of a nonprofessional setting work for him. In the absence of a lighting system for the blackouts between the vignettes, actor Kevin O’Neill rings a little brass bell, indicating that patrons should close their eyes. When he rings it again, they open their eyes for the next scene. The audience participation lends more magic to the proceedings than any technology could.

Dessert literally comes before the main theater course at the Big Kitchen, with a large array of sumptuous cakes and pies, served by the actors in waiter and waitress capacity.

Besides gently suggesting the T.S. Eliot question of “Should I, after tea and cake and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?,” the dual roles of actors and waiters again narrow the line between drama and real life.

All good theater, ultimately, aims not to be a show for spectators, but an initiation into a charmed circle where people learn to recognize and claim group feelings and experiences as their own.

Under that definition, “Counting the Ways” at the Big Kitchen can count itself, in its tiny, modest way, with the big guys. Count the days to the end of “Counting the Ways”--it may extend through the month of August, according to demand.

Make sure you don’t miss it.

“COUNTING THE WAYS”

By Edward Albee. Director is John Highkin. With Dana Case, Eric Grischkat and Kevin O’Neill. At 8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday at 3003 Grape St. 234-5789.