Cartwright’s ‘Road’ Leads to the Great Outdoors

The courtyard adjacent to Stages Theatre in Hollywood becomes a lonely British streetscape in Jim Cartwright’s “Road” (1986), opening this weekend. “I’ve seen it performed all over the world, but it’s never been done outdoors before,” the British playwright said admiringly. “The audience sits on one side; on the left side is the ‘road,’ on the right side is this sort of demolished wall--and you can look into the rooms inside.”

The entire action takes place on a single night on a Lancashire road, the poorest street in a district stricken with unemployment. “A character named Scullery is the guide-narrator,” explained Cartwright, 32. “He takes you through the dangerous parts, the safe parts, tells you stories. The audience gets to peep into these peoples’ lives, see how they tick. It’s sort of as if you walked along the street yourself, listening through the windows and getting snatches of conversations.”

Seven actors play the 25-plus characters--among them, young lovers Joey and Claire, a skinhead who’s turned to Buddhism, “a lonely woman who found a soldier and takes him back to her place to find a bit of happiness, and a 50-ish guy questioning why he’s on the scrap heap now: no job, no money.” Cartwright, who originally wrote the piece for London’s Royal Court Theatre (where it has been revived twice), acknowledges there are political overtones, “but mostly these are just people everyone can relate to.”

MOMMIE DEAREST: Salome Jens dons an unpopular character--the tyrannical, self-involved, money-grubbing, social-climbing mother--in Strindberg’s “The Pelican,” at 2nd Stage in Hollywood. “The play isn’t done very often,” noted Jens, “probably because it’s not easy to do. I’ve spoken to some actresses who didn’t think they were healthy enough to play the part. You have to be strong to put up with an audience’s upset with the character.”

Her crime? “She came from meager beginnings, and wanted to move into a place of respect. So her relationships became about money, potentiality, trying to survive the creative needs she had. She’s terrified of being poor, of being bereft of anything beautiful. And she has neglected her two children in that need for position, love, money. But she’s also a human being who pays a price for her blindness; she pays a price for her children’s pain.”

The actress described the turn-of-the-century work as “a play of diminishing options. We now know how moving into new (behavior) is possible. But then the past was the present--and the future.”