STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Scar’ Leaves a Compelling Mystery Unsolved

The first thing that assails you when you walk into the Met Theatre to see “Scar” is designer Nina Ruscio’s wall-to-wall re-creation of a Santa Fe living room: Spacious, high-ceilinged, dramatic, waiting for something to happen.

Less “happens” than one might expect, because a lot of Murray Mednick’s play is intended as a stalking, suspenseful waiting game, greatly enhanced by James Campbell’s compositions (chilling replications of percussive American Indian sounds intended to spook us), Jan Kroeze’s shadowy lighting scheme and sound designer Leonora Schildkraut’s impressive assortment of hooting owls, chirping crickets and rolling thunder.

If these are state-of-the-art tricks of the trade that happen to ideally serve the aims of this production, the central performance by Ed Harris is no trick. It is an actor’s total emotional surrender to a complex, disturbing role. In what marks his return to the Los Angeles stage after far too many years, he delivers a wrenching portrait of a damaged Vietnam War vet who walked away--literally--from a career in music to search for himself in the New Mexican remoteness.

That is where Mednick’s philosophical debate begins. Matt (Harris) has accidentally bumped into his former music colleague Stevie (Michael Woods), now a successful pop star and owner of this upscale desert spread, and Stevie has invited him to dinner. But all does not go smoothly. For one thing, Matt shows up at 2 a.m., rousing the household and a few old wounds with what seems, at least at first, like an unreasonable request.

Matt has come under the influence of a man named Scar, a seer of sorts, who may or may not be another casualty of the war. Scar wants something and Matt is here to get it. But is this man he calls his “teacher” real? Does Scar exist, a furtive, menacing shadow concealed in the folds of the mesas? Or does he live exclusively in Matt’s mind?

It hardly matters. What matters is what ensues among Matt, Stevie, Stevie’s wife Molly (Debora-Lee Furness) and his agent, Ralph (Rene Assa). They become tangled in a tug of values that forces all of them to try to define the meaning of success.

The idea is handled transparently by Mednick, who lets us know in short order whose side he’s on. This stacking of the decks waters down discussion, but a play is not an intellectual dissertation so much as a living membrane. This one invokes not rationality but the recondite logic of supernatural forces in nature and Indian lore. When you function by this different set of rules, even the fumbles-- especially the fumbles--take on their own emotional persuasiveness. No one here, except that material boy Ralph, is particularly sure of anything. And the relativity of success, like that of truth, remains suspended and elusive.

It is a concept whose importance director Darrell Larson understands completely. His expertly engineered production covers up some of the play’s more ragged seams. The set, music, lights and sound conspire to provide an optimum context for four beautifully orchestrated performances.

Assa, at the low end of the spiritual scale, is a Maalox-driven Ralph, a blunt businessman from the top of his balding head to the tip of his Gucci shoes, who has no time to waste on losers like Matt.

Furness’ Molly, on the other hand, is intrigued and compassionate. She, even more than the patient but exacerbated Stevie (a strong showing by Woods as the epitome of self-assurance), wants to understand. But it is Harris, an actor at the top of his form, who mesmerizes. At once self-derisive, insecure, majestic, aggressive and ailing, he compels an audience to mark him.

Mednick seems happiest as a playwright when he deals, as he did in his earlier “Coyote Cycle,” with American Indian mystery. His language and imagery in “Scar” are almost always compelling, even when the thought process might be called into question. The result is a play that in the end leaves us as perplexed as we were at the beginning, but that, in this superbly unified production, takes us through some arresting rituals of the mind.

* “Scar,” Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends March 22. $15; (213) 957-1152). Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

‘Scar’

Rene: Assa Ralph

Ed Harris: Matt

Michael Woods: Stevie

Deborah-Lee Furness: Molly

A Met Theatre presentation. Producers Jane Alsobrook, Tom Bower, William W. Fletcher. Director Darrell Larson. Playwright Murray Mednick. Sets Nina Ruscio. Lights Jan Kroeze. Costumes Stephanie Kerley. Sound Leonora Schildkraut. Composer James Campbell. Stage manager Brenda smith. Assistant stage manager Ruben Canonge.