STAGE REVIEW : A Full Pot Sadly Overflows in ‘The Krewe of Neptune’

“You ever get ghost leg?” Rose Bonvillain asked Louis Thomassie.

Louis said yeah. He said sometimes he reaches down to scratch his leg, but it’s not there.

He lost his leg in Vietnam and now has a wooden leg to help him get along.

Rose’s mother recently died, leaving her to watch out for her pubescent sister, Camille, among the men and snakes of bayou country.

Rose has a bad case of ghost mother. And there’s no wooden mother she can strap on to help her out.

In an hourlong solo performance Thursday night at Sushi, Anne Galjour played the parts of Rose; Louis, who wants to be her boyfriend; Camille and Mae Anne, the spirit of the dead mother. Galjour, a San Francisco-based performance artist, slipped among these and other roles, such as Rose’s mean brother, Tookie, who’s obsessed with a pet rooster named Danny.

She also gave a wonderful portrayal of Louis’ raspy mother, who botches her needle-and-potato ear-piercing jobs.

Galjour’s tale is pure Southern Gothic, with exploding earlobes, the wooden leg, voodoo chickens, dripping oyster juice and machetes, for starters. She steeps such grotesqueries in the richness of Mardi Gras lore, relieving the raunch and grunge of her character’s Cajon life with fantasies of sequined opulence.

The result is a mystic gumbo poetry that is gruesomely hilarious at times.

“The Krewe of Neptune,” the title Galjour has given this story of grief and healing, strings densely descriptive vignettes of the lives of two Cajun families. They are members of a social group, a krewe, which in Mardi Gras tradition builds a float, has a costume ball and, in a deliberate class reversal, elects a king and queen to preside over the celebrations. Rose has been chosen queen of the Krewe of Neptune.

To her credit, Galjour does not dish out a heavy New Orleans patois--she does not rely on easy cliches or theatricality. She also eschews narrative, using dialogue and monologues solely to express the fear, anger, vulnerability and compensatory toughness of her characters--mostly Rose and Camille. Galjour delivers a near-cinematic view of the actions and interactions of these characters in differing settings.

It’s a tall order, and Galjour nearly pulls it off. The writing is well-structured, amusing, touching, intelligent and empathetic. Her speaking voice has a range and variety of timbres ideal for theater, and, when the story allows her to stay with a character long enough to believably embody him or her, her acting is deft.

Not deft enough at times, however, particularly when she must deliver lines for three characters in the space of seconds, slipping from one to the next without a breath--a feat that would test any skilled actor.

Galjour’s “Krewe” falls short mainly because her material overflows its gumbo pot. The staging and direction just don’t match the strength of her language-loving material.

The Sushi program notes credit Mary Forcade for direction, and also give special thanks to David Cale. One wishes that David Cale might have added something to the direction, too. Like Cale, who has performed several times in the last few years at Sushi, Galjour has both a storyteller’s gift and strengths as a writer. But Cale takes a simpler, less theatrical approach, and a much slower pace, letting his characters’ words linger, letting their terror and pain register, and giving the darker implications of humorous episodes time to surface.

It’s a question of digestion, perhaps. Gumbo is a one-course meal, and Galjour’s has all the necessary ingredients and some savory aftertastes. “Krewe” seems a little too rushed, as if anxious to achieve its happy end. In the process it loses some of its potentially satisfying piquancy.

Anne Galjour performs “The Krewe of Neptune” at 8 p.m. today at Sushi, 852 8th Ave. Call 235-8466.