STAGE REVIEW : ‘Abundance’ of Riches by Blackfriars

The late 19th-Century American West lives and breathes on the stage of Blackfriars Theatre, formerly known as the Bowery. It’s the rough, stark setting for Beth Henley’s “Abundance,” a passionate, vivid and gut-wrenching story about a 25-year friendship between two mail-order brides, now in its San Diego premiere at the company’s Bristol Court Playhouse, formerly known as the Kingston Playhouse.

To its considerable credit, in an age where money makes theater magic possible, Blackfriars pulls off this transformation without fancy props or special effects, but with superb acting and directing. The great skill of its supporting design team comes from knowing how not to overdo it.

Beeb Salzer’s wonderful all-white set is as bleak and bare as the Wyoming and Missouri landscape where these women find themselves. A jagged edge at the top of the backdrop suggests mountains close by, light pencil sketches on the side walls conjure mountains in the distance, a floor of rocks show the harshness of the land beneath their feet.

Lawrence Czoka’s original score, which adapts songs contemporary with the period, seductively ushers in the mood.

But it is the acting, under tough, unsentimental direction by Ralph Elias, artistic director of the company, that makes this story explode.

Allison Brennan plays Bess Johnson, a meek and repressed woman who comes West in 1868 to find true love from a man with whom she has only corresponded. While she is waiting on a bench for that man to pick her up, she meets Macon Hill (Linda Libby), who is also waiting for a man to pick her up.

They are seeming opposites: Bess is looking for love, Macon is seeking adventure. Macon wants to write books and see elephants. Bess wants a man to sing and dream with.

The men are, not surprisingly, a surprise. Instead of a sweet singer, Bess learns that the man she was waiting for is dead and she has to settle for his brother, Jack Flan (John Blunt)--a man who detests music, tenderness and weakness of any kind. Instead of an adventurer, Macon gets Will Curtis (Paul James Kruse)--a hard-working, one-eyed widower who offers her his dead wife’s ring and later, in a more passionate moment, writes her a letter addressed from their cow.

What each performer brings to the part is an innate dignity and integrity--each character is true to him or herself, even as each one, in turn, fails at least one of the others in crucial moments.

Henley, best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Crimes of the Heart,” shows a leap in maturation with this work. She abandons the easy jokes that come with her usual quirky Southern characters, but her skillful mastery of black humor seems all the stronger for being less regionally specific. We do not know precisely where the women of “Abundance” came from before going West; remarkably it doesn’t matter.

The play does not seem to have a point in a conventional sense unless that point is that people are not always what they seem to be, life can yield the unexpected, and luck and chance are the stars that ultimately guide our way in a mapless world.

In lesser hands than Henley’s, the absence of a more tangible theme would make the scenes fall apart like pages in a book without a solid binding. But the characterizations are so mesmerizing that one doesn’t care. In “Abundance,” one gets to watch life unfold on the Western frontier from the pioneering woman’s point of view--a too little explored vantage point delivered in a gritty and truthful-sounding way.

There are quibbles to be sure. Bess makes a switch at one point in the play that seems far too rapid and extreme. She survives a traumatic situation by using her friend as a model--which is believable--but then she abandons her friend with unwarranted heartlessness and returns to her with a feeling that is far less than what her friend deserves.

Given the nature of the women’s opposite characterizations and the suddenness of their transformations, this could have come off like a cartoon--a theatrical Thelma and Louise Go West story.

But this acting and directing team dives too deep into the material to fall into that trap. Instead, the cast brings up fistfuls of treasures at every turn.

Libby, with a light in her eyes and fire in her step, commands the stage, charging it up every time she is on it. Brennan, although she still needs to clarify her character’s changes, elegantly delineates the poignancy of the withdrawn and fearful Bess.

Blunt smolders as Jack, a charismatic bully whose violence is revealed to be a manifestation of his inner weakness. Kruse, whose character becomes a figure of unwitting fun, finds his anchor in decency. Tim Reilly plays Prof. Elmore Crome, the man who changes the lives of these characters as well as that of the entire Western frontier, with unctuous authenticity.

J.A. Roth’s lighting design is simple, subtle and effective. Clare Henkel’s costumes are entirely believable.

Although there is room for fine-tuning the show’s swift turns of fate, much of it now is polished enough to be outstanding just as it is. This is an auspicious season opener for Blackfriars Theatre--and one of the must-see shows of 1991.

“ABUNDANCE”

By Beth Henley. Director, Ralph Elias. Original music and sound design, Lawrence Czoka. Scenic design, Beeb Salzer. Lighting, J.A. Roth. Costumes, Clare Henkel. Stage manager, Ollie Nash. With Allison Brennan, Linda Libby, John Blunt, Paul James Kruse and Tim Reilly. At 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays, with Sunday matinees at 2. Through Nov. 17. Tickets are $14-$20. At 1057 1st Ave., San Diego, 232-4088. During Family Theatre Days on Wednesday and Sunday, youths 14 to 18 get in free when an adult buys a half-price ticket for $8-$9.50 from the Times Arts Tix Booth in Horton Plaza. (The theater is not recommending this play for anyone under 14.)