STAGE REVIEW : An Ambitious ‘Electra’ Takes Flight

There is a delicately extrapolated idea at the heart of Bruce E. Rogers’ “Lost Electra” at the International City Theatre in Long Beach. It is a fundamental notion of loss and redemption, of courage and love and the obligation to keep going even when the pain is so great that it doesn’t seem possible to do so.

Nothing very new here. As always, what makes the old seem new is the approach. Rogers has intermingled the story of an ordinary suburban family that experiences major loss with that of flier Amelia Earhart, who vanished over the Pacific in 1937.

The connecting currents are not strong, however, and the play skims over large informational gaps that frequently leave an audience at sea without much of a compass. But, as the play sails to its conclusion, gingerly sidestepping its problems, the momentum swells with surprising force, finally crashing over us with greater emotional impact than the timid ripples of the beginning led us to expect.

This watery imagery fits. Not only is it suggested by Earhart’s presumed ocean grave, but it connects to events in the life of the Toller family of the play as well.

The time is 1962. The father, Mike (Sam Anderson), is an insurance man who has traded dreams of flying for a “Father Knows Least” kind of restlessness in the suburbs. He had been a flyer during World War II who once set out on an unofficial solo mission to find the spot where Earhart’s Electra had gone down. Instead, his own craft took a dive, and he floated for days alone in the water, fearful of sharks and talking to Earhart in hallucinations.

The mother, Sylvia (Nancy Lenehan), is more of a cipher--a contented housewife and mother who hasn’t given much thought to anything--and certainly not feminist issues--until her uncommonly bright 12-year-old son brings the subject home from school.

The boy, Alan (played with refreshing simplicity by Nicholas Cagle), is eager to explore what makes adults tick. When a school project focuses on the Earhart disappearance, he and his Dad are finally on one track.

Dad’s obsession with Earhart is rekindled and triggers an improbable series of events that includes Alan’s accidental death by drowning. That’s where credibility is stretched thin and where the interplay with the Earhart trauma is weakened by forced obviousness.

Up to this point, we’ve seen Earhart (Becky London) and her husband, George Putnam (Jan Munroe), chiefly weaving in and out of the other action, playing out scenes from their own marriage.

But here the playwright attempts, less successfully, to mesh the philosophical twists of both plot lines--those of the grieving parents with Earhart reminiscences and the motivations that led her to undertake her fatal flight.

What rescues the contrivance is the superior group of performers brought together by director Deborah La Vine. They navigate the play’s tricky flaws expertly enough to make the piece almost work. But they can’t endow the sketchy characters with what’s not there.

Putnam and Earhart are symbols and Mike and Sylvia are stick figures. We know too little about them outside the breakfast nook or living-room--their lives with others or what holds them together, given Mike’s glumness in the marriage.

Rogers saves his most persuasive lines for Alan, alive and dead. And the compassion young Cagle demonstrates for his suffering parents, especially Mike, culminate in the production’s most indelible image: the forgiving moment when the dead son kisses his distraught father on the forehead--and the boy becomes father to the man.

The liberation is complete. Everything is possible again. It is Beckett’s “I can’t go on; I must go on; I will go on.” Or as Earhart puts it: “Sometimes you have to push the stick forward and dive.”

Don Llewellyn has created a handsome and unusual set that suggests the curved interior of an aircraft. And Paulie Jenkins’ fluttering lights deliver watery effects for Mike’s flashback scenes in the Pacific. The exemplary actors briskly fulfill their tasks--not least Munroe, a talented performance artist, here at his most straightforward--but there are pieces missing on the navigational course that only the playwright can deliver.

“Lost Electra,” International City Theatre, Harvey Way and Clark Street, Long Beach. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 8. $15; (213) 480-3232, (213) 420-4128. Running time: 2 hours.

‘Lost Electra’

Nicholas Cagle: Alan Toller

Nancy Lenehan: Sylvia Toller

Sam Anderson: Mike Toller

Becky London: Amelia Earhart

Jan Munroe: George Putnam

Producer Shashin Desai. Director Deborah La Vine. Playwright Bruce E. Rogers. Set Don Llewellyn. Lights Paulie Jenkins. Costumes Laura Deremer. Makeup Barbara Matthews. Sound Philip G. Allen. Stage manager Brian Hugo.