Stage : Impressive View of ‘Our Country’

The phenomenon is hardly new, but invariably surprising. You see a play you’ve seen before and discover, in a new production, depths you had never fathomed.

This is not due to prior inadvertence. It’s what can happen with a change of creative team, and very much what happened at South Coast Repertory with “Our Country’s Good,” the Timberlake Wertenbaker play that opened Friday. It’s not new and had not been particularly celebrated until a well-received performance in New York last year, staged by Mark Lamos, brought it more attention than it had received since its 1989 American premiere at the Mark Taper Forum.

One mentions the director for a reason. “Our Country’s Good,” which focuses on the travails of a first group of British convicts to arrive in Australia in 1788, is not a star vehicle. It does not depend on one person’s fusion with a role. But it does depend on a certain illumination of text to be shouldered by an in-sync playing ensemble.

In this case, the illumination is director Martin Benson’s, who knew enough to seek three seasoned SCR founding members as fulcrum for his cast: Ron Boussom, Richard Doyle and Hal Landon Jr. To balance the company, Benson just as wisely went after such SCR stalwarts as Karen Hensel, Devon Raymond and Lynne Griffin, among others.

We’re in a penal colony in New South Wales among a brutalized riffraff whose manicured overseers--bewigged gentlemen of the British Royal Navy and Marines--would love nothing better than to hang the lot.

No one wants that more than Robbie Ross (Robert Sicular), a major who delights in spreading humiliation and pain. Luckily, Gov. Arthur Phillip (Hal Landon Jr.) is more susceptible to the suggestion of 2nd Lt. Ralph Clark (Ben Livingston) that what is needed is to find a way to civilize, not execute, this flotsam. Partly by chance and partly because cruelty and death have taken such a steep psychological toll, they decide to try to tame the devils by putting on a play: George Farquhar’s “The Recruiting Officer.”

“Our Country’s Good” is based on “The Playmaker” by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally (on staff, as luck would have it, at UC Irvine), which is based on historical fact: tales of Australia’s first settlers, centering on this play-making episode. The heart of Wertenbaker’s drama is devoted to the subtleties of that experience: the rough rehearsals, the raw inter-relationships, the alien environment (emotional and physical) and the gradual shifting of all that desperation.

Except for the one playing Clark, all the actors take on more than one role, with the convict-players in the play-within-the-play having an exchange about how confusing just such a doubling-up might be for an audience. It’s a perilous conceit that these actors pull off flawlessly, never falsifying a line, yet bringing into sharp focus the civilizing power of “making theater.”

That is the real voyage of discovery here: Watching actors seeing to it that something as lowly as staging a play transports us while we watch it transport them. You’ll find it in the transformation of Hensel’s intelligent, gruff Liz Morden, almost hanged for stealing food she never stole; in Boussom’s exquisite flourish as Robert Sideway, a man fatally bitten by the acting bug; and in Griffin’s ardent Dabby Bryant, learning to clamor for her space on that stage.

A striking performance is given by Doyle in several roles, but especially as tragic Harry Brewer, a hallucinating provost, fending off with alcohol and sex intolerable visions of his victims. His strength lends power to Penny Johnson’s conflicted Duckling, a convict who’d love to love him and can’t.

Compelling, too, is the stillness of Raymond’s Mary Brenham, a woman whose quiet beauty stirs Clark’s sleeping heart--or James’ Black Caesar, a lost soul yearning to connect with his Madagascan ancestors. Wertenbaker injects an abstract aboriginal response from those whose lives would forever be redefined by this invasion, but it’s peripheral and least persuasive.

Gerard Howland, a designer new to SCR, has created a handsome raked setting the color of old parchment, with booms and billowing sails that extend into the audience and on which is projected the title of each scene. Paulie Jenkins’ lights, Nathan Birnbaum’s sound and music, and Walker Hicklin’s costumes round out the atmosphere. But behind the window dressing, it is Wertenbaker’s sense of effective structure and confessional riffs that hold us in thrall.

A word of caution: Many of those riffs are in mid-19th-Century London slang, chewy but hard to absorb. Give yourself time. It’s worth it.

* “Our Country’s Good,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 22. $25-$34; (714) 957-4033. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes. Hal Landon Jr.: Capt. Arthur Phillip, Royal Navy, Governor of New Wales/John Wisehammer

Robert Sicular: Maj. Robbie Ross, Royal Marines/Ketch Freeman

Ron Boussom: Capt. David Collins, RM, Judge Advocate/Robert Sideway

Hawthorne James: Capt. Watkin Tench, RM/an aboriginal Australian/Black Caesar

Richard Doyle: Capt. Jeremy Campbell, RM/Midshipman Harry Brewer, RN/John Arscott

Devon Raymond: Rev. Johnson/Mary Brenham/Meg Long

Penny Johnson: Lt. George Johnston, RM/Duckling Smith

Karen Hensel: Lt. Will Dawes, RM/Liz Morden

Benjamin Livingston: 2nd Lt. Ralph Clark, RM

Lynne Griffin: 2nd Lt. William Faddy, RM/Dabby Bryant

Director Martin Benson. Playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker. Sets Gerard Howland. Lights Paulie Jenkins. Costumes Walker Hicklin. Sound and music Nathan Birnbaum. Production manager Edward Lapine. Stage manager Julie Haber.