STAGE REVIEW : Attachment to Land Binds People to Tragic Destiny in ‘Holy Days’

If a poem is a form of dense evocational shorthand, Sally Nemeth’s “Holy Days” is a stage poem. It is uncommonly affecting--an elegy for the lost souls in the dying plains of Kansas, 1936, who clung to their blighted homesteads like bees to the poisoned hive. Not as a matter of choice, but of inevitability. As one of the characters in the play that opened Saturday at South Coast Repertory explains, “It never occurred to us to leave.”

This is not the first time an artist has written about place as destiny. The late Emlyn Williams in his film, “Woman of Dolwyn,” showed a Welsh shepherd who, rather than leave, chose to sit with his flock in the path of the oncoming torrent when his native village was wiped out by the construction of a dam. In “The Ik,” British director Peter Brook introduced us to an East African tribe that put up with dehumanizing starvation rather than be moved to different ground, when the land around them was turned into a wildlife preserve and they could no longer hunt.

Roots. Destiny. Paralysis. Humanity. The suggestion in all these works, including Nemeth’s sparingly crafted 80-minute tone poem at South Coast, is that there is a deep imprinting by the land on its inhabitants; that there is an invisible DNA that links us to it and makes us what we are, for better or for worse. Any immigrant will tell you that there is a volume of truth in that, even when not moving is not a solution.

Nemeth doesn’t take on so grand a theme. She goes for the smaller picture to illustrate the large one. Her “Holy Days” presents four members of a farm family struggling to hang on. They are middle-aged Gant (Richard Doyle), his wife Rosie (Jeanne Paulsen), young Will (John K. Linton) and his pregnant wife Molly (Devon Raymond). The relationship between the couples is not entirely clear and it doesn’t matter whether Will is a farmhand or Gant’s cousin, nephew or in-law. The overriding bond--and Nemeth knows this at some fundamental level--is the ruined land that the men work together.

This is “The Grapes of Wrath” in reverse. There is not much plot. What there is, is simple and stirring. It consists of one decision. Gant finds out that he can get work through the Works Progress Administration on a bridge-building crew some distance away and decides to do it. To feed the rest of them. Rosie, a woman traumatized by other events in her life, hates the idea. End of story.

It is not the action that counts, but the chiseled characters. Nemeth is a miniaturist. So, in this instance, is director Martin Benson, who has served the play with emphasis on body language and without fear of its long, eloquent silences. The detailing is all. John Iacovelli’s set is beige and worn--everything covered with a fine layer of dust. Dust permeates the jeans and overalls worn by the men. Their faces are ashen. There is permanent dirt under their fingernails, permanent dust in Gant’s hair. It sticks to his perspiration stained hat. When he pours water to drink, it is by the half-glass. Nothing to waste.

The women’s clothes are drab, but cleaner, down to their heavy wrinkled stockings (Ann Bruice designed the costumes). Each time anyone shakes out one of the cloths or kerchiefs that cover the kitchen table or their faces or heads, dust shakes out. The sense of desiccation is pervasive--of land and lives dried out by wind and circumstance.

Is there a play in this? There is. Amazingly. A majestic and gripping one, largely thanks to the care with which the production was assembled and cast. By not asking for pity or empathy, Paulsen ensures that we embrace Rosie’s distanced, troubled soul, paralyzed in the midst of creeping disaster. Behind her frozen face, the pain is enormous. Doyle’s Gant, a man of few words, makes each one count. You feel the alienated love and believe the torment between them.

Will is a simpler fellow, but no simpleton. Played with un-self-conscious boyishness by Linton, he comes off as a good, if slightly scattered man. Raymond’s bright and attractive Molly may be way ahead of him, but she’ll never let her husband lag far behind. Of all the characters, Molly’s is the most surprising, partly for that kind of patient generosity and partly because of her unfailing instinct for the simple phrase to express complex thoughts.

It is Nemeth’s instinct, of course, and it is everywhere in her play. There is beauty and wisdom in this little piece, directed by Benson with an equally stern and loving hand. Play and production are never indulgent, redundant or soft. The poetry is the authentic one of people who use language sparingly, as though words were slightly foreign objects to be weighed, measured and prized. “Holy Days” was done only once before in England in 1988. Welcome home.

At 655 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8:30 p.m., Sundays 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. Ends Feb. 25. Tickets: $20-$25; (714) 957-4033.