STAGE REVIEW : Talent Isn’t Enough to Revive Dead

One tip-off that a show lacks certain vital signs, such as tension, shape and structure, is that no one is quite sure when it ends.

“Is that it?” someone whispered in the second row when the lights came on at the end of “Ned,” a one-man piece at Sushi Performance Gallery about a gangster, Ned, grieving over his dead girlfriend. “Is there a second act?”

“No, it’s over,” someone whispered back. There was a pause as the audience collectively realized that the second whisperer was right. Then they applauded--somewhat uncertainly.

The star of this show, Leonard Pitt, whose last show is tonight at Sushi, is a charismatic and fluid performer well worth cheering. As for the script by David Barth, well, let’s just say it’s as dead as Ned’s gal.

Massive injections of originality, cleverness, poetry and passion might not hurt, but it is hard to see how anything could make this corpse stand up and dance.

Until now, Pitt has been known for doing his own collaborative work that relies heavily on physical improvisation and philosophical exploration. In “Not for Real,” his only other show at Sushi, the San Francisco artist took a wildly imaginative look at the dichotomy between man’s mechanical and natural worlds in a series of seriocomic vignettes that spanned the centuries.

Here, for the first time, he tackles a script written as one 50-minute piece by someone else.

He tries valiantly to breathe life into Barth’s tale of a tough guy whose grief over the woman he loves gradually breaks down his defenses. He commands the stage energetically and passionately, creating scene after scene with minimal props and superb miming skills, moving convincingly from his home, to a shoot-out scene, to a deserted spot where he digs a grave, to a boat in the ocean (represented by a simple chair). His power of suggestion can almost make you see the invisible partners and enemies he’s addressing.

He even commits to Barth’s fantastical poetic imagery in which Ned deals with oatmeal (which seems to represent Ned’s boring wealth) and his arch-enemy, The Trout (an actual fish representing his own inner spiritual side). So even as he wars with The Trout outside him, he wars with the fish within that is struggling to get out.

In one of the show’s best moments, Pitt turns into The Trout, his hands undulating, his body quivering, his mouth making a fish’s sucking noises.

But, although the imagery may be--shall we say--different, there is nothing terribly fresh about the insights.

One can’t freshen up a story about a tough guy who learns to cry for someone he loves with elusive references to cereal and other fishy business. And the ending of the show just trails off inconclusively; there’s nothing we learn at the end that wasn’t established in the first five minutes.

The main redeeming feature in “Ned” is that there is just enough substance here to show that Pitt has potential as an actor as well as a performance artist. But this note, too, is cautionary. Such a future will be dependent on his ability to pick better material.