THEATER REVIEW ‘PEARLS AND MARLOWE’ : Prose and Cons : Raymond Chandler’s evocative words share top billing with the performers who portray some of his shady characters.

“The streets were dark with something more than night,” wrote Raymond Chandler of the shadow world in which his ‘30s and ‘40s Philip Marlowe detective stories were set. It was a world of seedy shamuses, cops on the take and deadbeats on the fast hustle. People didn’t walk into a scene, they “drifted.” Life was as cheap as a chalk stripe suit. And everyone was a loner.

It must have been a love affair with Chandler’s world, and even more with his language, that prompted Robert G. Egan to script and direct his original stage adaptation “Pearls and Marlowe,” now in its first outing at the UC Santa Barbara Department of Dramatic Art. It’s a witty, affectionate, often visually stunning piece of theater, and an entertaining homage to a master of the genre. And it could easily enjoy a successful afterlife in a more professional venue.

Passing over more familiar turf in the Chandler canon, Egan draws his play from two lesser-known Marlowe short stories--”Goldfish” and “Red Wind,” thematically linked by the pearls that become the focus of the characters’ quests.

In the first, “Goldfish,” city slicker Marlowe (Jason Cottle) leaves his familiar haunts for Olympia, Wash., to find an ex-con (Hal Kohlman) who’s still hiding the legendary Leander pearls from a 19-year-old heist.

Unfortunately, also on the trail of the pearls are a femme fatale (Rebecca Pridmore) with eyes as cold as her mocking laughter, and her shyster boyfriend (Jay Worth). And when it comes to methods, they don’t share Marlowe’s scruples . . . .

In the second story, “Red Wind,” a chance shooting in a local bar draws Marlowe into intrigue. He finds a woman (Kerry Neel) trying to recover a coveted set of pearls from a blackmailing chauffeur, her philandering husband (Worth) and a corrupt police detective (Kohlman) who’d just as soon bump off our hero as spit.

Chandler’s prose shares top billing with the performers in Egan’s adaptation. He incorporates descriptive passages and mid-scene running commentary verbatim, most of it from Marlowe (“The dark guy took a week to fall down . . .”). But often the other characters provide their own introductions and descriptions. Even glassy-eyed corpses will obligingly supply their own obituaries (“He sat like that, limp, his chin on his chest, his eyes looking upward. Dead as a pickled walnut.”)

The stories are presented back to back and Egan’s adaptations are painstakingly literal. In resisting the temptation to combine or embellish, Egan allows us to appreciate Chandler’s impeccably tight dramatic throughlines intact. Even if the result is really like watching a pair of one-acts (and it is), the material is so engaging it requires no dangling plot threads to lure us back after the intermission.

Where Egan asserts his own influence is in the staging, which combines realism with abstract representation. Opening the piece on a suitably desolate note, silhouetted figures framed within the set’s two-tiered scaffold hypnotically intone the prologue (“the soot . . . was rolling across the glass top of my desk in tiny particles, like pollen drifting over a vacant lot. . .”).

The characters occupy an appropriate no-man’s land between reality and fiction. Much of this representation is ingenious--cupped hands waving in a hollow tank become swimming goldfish. Other attempts exceed the object skills of the plucky but youthful student cast--as when they lose the focus on their imaginary cigarettes.

For all their enthusiasm, the performers aren’t mature enough to fully evoke the jaded nuances of Chandler’s deadbeats. Especially Marlowe. Cottle captures the cocky bravado and the sarcasm, but not the world-weary, poetic core beneath the hard-bitten shell.

For Marlowe is not like the sharks he swims with. We see the difference when he takes the extra trouble to shoot a brutal killer in the kneecap (Mickey Spillane’s gumshoes wouldn’t have bothered), or lies to the police to keep an innocent woman out of trouble.

For all his tough, cynical banter, Marlowe is essentially a moralist, trying to stake out a territory acceptable to his own sense of ethics in the midst of a cesspool with no fixed points of reference. This is his tragedy, and his resonant humanity despite the cartoonish trappings of his genre.

All the elements are there in Egan’s script; we just need to see them clearer.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“Pearls and Marlowe,” performed tonight through Saturday at the UC Santa Barbara Studio Theatre. All performances are at 8 p.m. (no late seating). Tickets are $10. Call (805) 893-3535 for reservations or further information.