STAGE REVIEW : McMurtry Clearly Brings Life to ‘Life’

The world of theater is usually crammed full of people and moments that are more perfectly realized than they ever are in life. Every actor on stage always knows the perfect bon mot. They are cleverer than anyone has a right to be and raring to pounce with the quick comeback, the profound insight and the heart-wrenching revelation. Even awkward pauses are intentional--a function of artfully placed ellipses--and pregnant with meaning.

Between scenes the actors go backstage to become stammering, fumbling fools like the rest of us.

David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre” is a 15-year-old play now in its San Diego premiere at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, and it takes place on- and off-stage in its own fictional theater. Backstage the two actors fumble as they ready their make-up (and lose their brushes), struggle with their costumes (and break a zipper), lose their props (and nearly kill each other with fencing swords). Onstage they make mistakes as well, but they are clearly professionals.

It’s all very Pirandellian. Actors playing actors. And, when they are performing scenes, actors playing actors playing actors. It’s material that plays mind games with the performers as much as it does with the audience.

But, despite the obvious artifice, Mamet makes the story seem real--and the Gaslamp production serves the play well. It’s very funny, but the mishaps are also poignant. Particularly since most of them happen to the older actor, Robert, who is played with extraordinary eloquence by Jonathan McMurtry. Each mishap moves Robert closer to the realization that his life in the theater is ending. And, since he has been in the theater his whole life, these mishaps, in essence, bring him face to face with his own mortality.

This is a slight play, running an intermissionless 90 minutes--more character portrayal than plot. But there is a curve to the story. When the young actor, John (David Ellenstein) first meets Robert, he is awed by him. He praises Robert nervously. He is eager to please, helping him with his coat, plying him with questions, asking advice.

As time passes and the young actor’s confidence grows, he needs and respects Robert less. He doesn’t want to be bothered as he takes calls about auditions for other shows. He gets better notices than Robert. He grows impatient with Robert’s advice, becomes angry at the older man’s mistakes in their shared scenes. And then, as Robert starts to crumble, John begins to worry about him. He tries to please him again, but for different reasons.

In his direction, Will Roberson wisely has stepped back, and he doesn’t play these men for laughs. Robert and John retain their dignity. They seem inadvertently funny when they botch scenes in front of their imaginary audience. They just can’t seem to keep the wig from falling off during the French Revolution, or get the cigars to light during a British melodrama, or the lifeboat to rock during the shipwreck scene.

The actors, particularly Robert, care deeply about a good play and a good script. Robert agonizes over his mistakes. Lives for the applause. Smooths back his thinning hair with an almost desperate urgency as if his thinning hair is symbolic of the thinning resources he has left.

Ellenstein’s weakness as John is that it is hard to read how he feels about his life in the theater. His strength is in his relationship to Robert, beautifully conveyed through Mamet’s clipped, fragmentary dialogue.

Although “A Life in the Theatre” is mainly about life in the theater, it does touch sensitively on themes of aging and loneliness as well.

At times the show is so revealing that one gets the feeling of being a peeping Tom, watching the backs of the actors playing to their imaginary audience on the other side of the stage.

The work of the design team is impeccable. Mike Buckley’s set shows a realistically gray, cluttered backstage in the foreground that leads, through a scrim, to the fictional stage and varied sets on which they perform for their “other” audience.

Ashley York Kennedy’s lighting perfectly delineates the different portions of the set and also successfully conveys the passage of time, zeroing in with brutal starkness on McMurtry’s face near the end of the play. Jeanne Reith’s costumes are attuned with the characters and the parts they play. Jeff Ladman’s sound design keeps pace with the wildly varied sequence of plays.

Although the play is minor, it is worth seeing for a look at the early Mamet; this is a more sensitive and tender-hearted work than he is known for. And this production also should be seen for McMurtry, one of San Diego’s local acting treasures, who draws upon the depth of decades worth of experience to give invaluable insights into what a life in the theater can be all about.

“A LIFE IN THE THEATRE”

By David Mamet. Director, Will Roberson. Sets, Michael Buckley. Costumes, Jeanne Reith. Lighting, Ashley York Kennedy. Sound, Jeff Ladman. Stage manager, Mark Stevens. With David Ellenstein and Jonathan McMurtry. At 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, with Sunday matinees at 2, through May 10. Running time: 90 minutes. Tickets are $15-20. At the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 4th Ave., San Diego, 234-9583.