STAGE REVIEW : ‘Gate’: A Roundelay in Verse

It’s not often that we run into verse plays written much beyond the 18th Century. So a play in verse based on a modern novel in verse that deals with the lives of five people and a cat in contemporary San Francisco is a genuine oddity.

Vikram Seth’s 1986 novel, “The Golden Gate,” is even more remarkable an exploit for having been composed in strict sonnet form, with its 14-line schematic rhyme. This is complex enough without the further problems of condensing it into a play. But director-adapter Stephen Sachs has created a piece of high melodrama out of “The Golden Gate” at the Fountain Theatre that dances all over the original manuscript and, in its sleek final form, remains faithful to it in style and content.

This is good and bad news, because form here supersedes content, which has the soapy ordinariness of a latter-day “Aspects of Love,” David Garnett’s 1955 novel which served as the basis for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Relationships among friends and lovers break apart and come together like DNA molecules engaged in a wistful gavotte.

To read Seth’s novel is to roam through a talented curiosity. But giving it flesh in a theater weighs it down with opacity, which may explain why Charlemagne, the cat, imagined but not seen, is the most vivid of the characters.

This is no reflection on the actors, the adaptation or Sachs’ fluid direction, which goes for a swirling sense of time and place minimally anchored by Ken Booth’s mostly golden lighting and Sachs’ inventive design: assorted blocks on a ramp (bridge?) representing the San Francisco skyline or used as furniture and set against an incandescent back wall.

Handsome young executive John (Larry Poindexter), in search of love and fulfillment, is helped out by his friend Janet (Emily Kuroda), a sculptor who nurses a secret love for him and places an ad for him in the personals column.

This introduces John to Liz (Jacqueline Schultz), a willowy attorney, owner of the ferocious Charlemagne. Liz and John fall in love; Charlemagne and John despise each other on sight.

The rancor breaks up the affair. Liz gravitates toward Phil (Dan Sturdivant), a radical friend of John’s, abandoned by his wife, whose sexual orientations are sufficiently ambidextrous to have also swept up Liz’s sexually uncertain brother Ed (Tom Sullivan).

This “As the Verse Turns” is crowned by a tragic ending. Much of it works, some of it doesn’t. The rhymed speech is awkward, despite actors who know how to handle it. Poindexter’s John exudes yuppie charm and Kuroda has real backbone as in-the-wings Janet.

Sturdivant is more problematic. His Phil has an abrasive edge that makes it hard to see why he would hold brother and sister in thrall. Sullivan’s Ed may be weak and confused enough by religious upbringing, but why would Liz, who resisted temperament in John, accept it so complacently in Phil?

How much one embraces “The Golden Gate” in the end will depend on one’s appetite for its peculiarities. The play, like the novel, is an intriguing aberration.

At 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood, Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 3. Ends Nov. 25. $15; (213) 663-1525.