STAGE REVIEW : ‘Party’ a Skillful Mix of Virginia Woolf

A party can be very theatrical.

Stars and supporting players come and go. Intense impressions of each other are based on a few sketchy fragments of information. People think one thing and say another. The overall effect can be exhilarating or excruciating. Finally, all of the effort creates nothing more permanent than memories.

It’s like many a play.

Virginia Woolf took her readers behind the scenes, so to speak, into the brains of several partygoers at Mrs. Dalloway’s London house and garden, and Ellen McLaughlin has combined three of the resulting short stories into a miniature play, “The Party.”

This 40-minute, one-woman show, which opened the Mark Taper Forum’s season at the Itchey Foot restaurant last weekend and plays only through this weekend, is a crystal-clear demonstration of how to conjure up worlds of thought and feeling from the apparently trivial, using only the barest of production values.

Tall, majestic Kathleen Chalfant tells the stories and enacts all of the roles to perfection, directed by David Esbjornson. The sleek elegance of her neo-Grecian look, juxtaposed with the skittering sensations running through the minds of her characters, creates moments of surprisingly high-pitched humor as well as piercing insight.

Mabel Waring, of “The New Dress,” is the funniest creation. She hoped to create a little excitement out of her humdrum life by wearing an exotic old-fashioned dress to the party. Upon her arrival, however, the charms of the dress disappear and she feels mortified not only at her choice of outfit but also at her own ability to be so easily mortified.

Imagine Cathy Guisewite’s “Cathy” in the 1920s, expressing her anxieties in the prose of Virginia Woolf instead of a comic strip balloon.

In “Together and Apart,” Mr. Serle and Miss Anning exchange what would sound like the most perfunctory of pleasantries. But Woolf and Chalfant dissect the accompanying thoughts so thoroughly, so perceptively, that we quickly agree with Miss Anning that “nothing is so strange as human intercourse.”

In “A Summing Up,” Sasha Latham and Bertram Pritchard stroll in the garden. While Bertram prattles on, Sasha looks at the scenery, and her thoughts veer wildly between hope and despair for all of humankind.

McLaughlin wove the three stories together with a fluid and subtle touch, and Garth Hemphill’s lighting artfully highlights the transitions between stories. Unlike many of the Taper’s Itchey Foot productions, this one is polished to a fine gleam--no scripts in hand for Chalfant. It deserves a much longer life.

At 801 W. Temple St., Saturday at 2 and 6 p.m., Sunday at at 6 p.m. $8; (213) 972-7337.