THEATER REVIEW : New Center for Performing Arts Outshines Play : Theater: Poway’s new arts center is a fine stage venue. A production of ‘Playboy of the Western World’ was less interesting.

A weekend date with “The Playboy of the Western World” proved that the Poway Center for the Performing Arts is a comely, comfortable, highly courtable new space for theater in San Diego County.

As for the touring production by the Seattle Repertory Theatre, well, maybe a one-night stand was best.

Indeed, the best part of Friday night’s performance of John Millington Synge’s “Playboy” was how it showcased the new 800-seat house, which proved to be a dynamic home for live theater.

The Seattle Rep, which won this year’s Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for outstanding regional theater, has sent to Broadway “The Heidi Chronicles,” “Eastern Standard,” “Largely New York” and “I’m Not Rappaport.” And in many ways, this performance of “Playboy” was delivered nicely.

It was clearly at its best in evoking the mood and atmosphere of a small Irish county in the early 20th Century--from the accents honed by the American cast, to the roughly textured costumes by Michael Olich, to Marjorie Bradley Kellogg’s public house (a combination of pub and inn) with a suggestion of stone and wood and warmth. The lighting by Craig Miller and Douglas Davidson made smoke seem to waft from the chimney and Steven M. Klein’s sound design captured the feeling of wind and wailing sea just outside the door.

But the Poway facility, constructed by the same team that designed the Orange County Performing Arts Center, was the star of the evening. The acoustics made each nuance of dialogue and sound audible, and the deep 40-by-23-foot proscenium stage showed the set off like a jewel. Good sight lines from the 500 orchestra seats and 300 balcony seats benefited the 300 or so patrons who showed up.

Unfortunately, this is one production in which the violently beating heart of the play gets muffled in the Rep’s lingering attention to detail. For most of this 2 1/2-hour play about a young man who achieves notoriety, sneaking admiration and the love of his life when he announces he has killed his father, the production fails to evoke a smidgen of the uproar it caused at the play’s 1907 debut in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Riots ensued then, as patrons were outraged by Synge’s suggestions about human nature.

But here in 1990, the same play, re-created so faithfully by director Douglas Hughes and his excellent cast, seemed to raise nary an eyebrow. Maybe it was because the audience found it hard to understand the thick Irish brogue. Maybe it was because decades of television and film make one follow up the young man’s confession of patricide with “Yes, but what happens next?” And maybe it was because what happens next took much longer than it should because Hughes deliberately slowed the pace to let us drink in the accents and the atmosphere.

It’s too bad, because the play is as relevant as ever. The villagers’ obsession with making Christy Mahon (R. Hamilton Wright), the young man who says he killed his father, first into a hero and then into a villain, happens today as media darlings become media devils--often overnight.

Synge’s portrait of the publican’s lonely daughter, Pegeen (Barbara Dirickson), who falls in and out of love with Christy, conveys the fear of intimacy which makes her symbolize the public in her need to deal with people as icons rather than as human beings.

Then, too, suffused throughout the tragicomedy of poor, simple folk is Synge’s deep understanding of loneliness, another human affliction that shows no sign of ebbing any time soon.

Hughes’ cast gets the loneliness right. Each is good in his or her own sphere: a heated Dirickson as the wild Pegeen, who acts the part of the dutiful daughter; an admiring Wright as the obeisant son who acts the part of the wild Christy Mahon; Woody Eney foppish as Pegeen’s cowardly suitor, Shawn Keogh; and Marianne Owen calculating as the Widow Quin, who has seen everything and wants to make sure she can make this situation work out to her best advantage no matter what the outcome.

Where the production fails is in the connections between these people that spark the tragedy. Hughes, as he says in his own director’s notes, is thinking of Samuel Beckett, a playwright who writes of wastelands in which no one touches anyone; he should have thought of Eugene O’Neill, a playwright who better understood the aching, longing and tragic transience of so many romantic connections.

The tragedy of Pegeen and Christy is, after all, that the only time they really see each other is after they have lost each other. It is no accident that Christy’s new found love affair with the looking glass dovetails with his love for Pegeen. His love for her is all mixed up with his wanting to be the hero he sees reflected in her eyes; it is not just fate that causes him to have eyes for Pegeen rather than the Widow Quin, who knows him for the simple lad he is and loves him anyway.

When Christy looks at Pegeen after he has fallen from grace and gotten up again, brushing off his illusions, an infinitely wiser but sadder man, one should see a sympathy as well as sorrow for Pegeen, qualities sadly missing from this production.

Still, one gets a hint of the power that might have been in the last 15 minutes of the play, when Synge’s lightning-quick ironic reversals are delivered at breathless pace, and the show at last ceases to seem like a museum piece and suggests the quivering, tormented and tortured animal it always was in its heart.

It’s an energy that should have been there all along.

“THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD”

By John Millington Synge. Director is Douglas Hughes. Set by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg. Costumes by Michael Olich. Lighting by Craig Miller. Tour lighting design by Douglas Davidson. Sound by Steven M. Klein. With Barbara Dirickson, Woody Eney, William Biff McGuire, Wendell Wright, Rick Tutor, R. Hamilton Wright, Marianne Owen, Laura McDermott, Nancy Hume, Sarah Welsh, John Aylward, Peter Crook, William Ritchie and Richard Anthony. At the Poway Center for the Performing Arts, (619) 748-6600, ext. 254.