Stage Reviews : ‘Odd Jobs’ a Penetrating Look at a Human Triangle

“Odd Jobs” is an unfairly lackluster title for the penetrating Frank Moher play that opened over the weekend at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. It is a small, tightly woven work, whose title doesn’t begin to suggest the mathematical equation that connects its three characters, like the points of a triangle.

Fixed points. Each in its own universe. Tim (John Walcutt) is a Canadian assembly line cowboy smarting from having been laid off and replaced by a robotic arm. Mrs. Phipps (Nan Martin) is an elderly former mathematics professor for whom Tim offers to do the odd jobs of the title. And Ginette (Annie La Russa) is Tim’s French-Canadian wife, whose determined self-improvement wins her a way out of the complaints department at Sears (where she works) and into the higher-paying realm of systems analysts.

Snags develop when these three people’s needs intersect and their universes don’t, trapping Tim like a hypotenuse between the women.

Sounds like just another drama of family conflict? The difference comes in the depth of field, the shifts of each gravitational pull and the frequent lyricism of Moher’s writing (lyrical but not mawkish).

If Ginette takes the new job, it will require that she and Tim move to another town. But Tim has inadvertently become more necessary to Mrs. Phipps’ well-being than he intended--and she to his. At her request, he works for Mrs. Phipps six days a week, even though there isn’t really enough work for him to do. At his request, she teaches Tim math and is hugely reinvigorated by the task.

Tim may be just another unemployed and disgruntled husband with less than a high school education, Phipps may be just another ditsy old lady fending off uselessness and incipient Alzheimer’s, and Ginette may be no more than an impatient wife yearning for a better life, but each is also struggling to retain a crucial sense of personal worth. The dilemma that threatens their interdependency calls into question everything each one of them believes.

Moher, a Canadian, has written a deceptively simple story that, like David, takes on a Goliath. What each character must examine is not only the nature of self-validation, but also the nature of love and where the two can justifiably meet.

Each of these characters is fundamentally good, which makes the consequences of their actions all the more affecting. As the program notes contend, they suffer from isolation in a world where community has lost its own sense of itself. This makes personal alienation doubly disorienting. There is no compass in such a universe, so that any relationship that connects us to one another anchors us in ourselves.

Moher is eloquent in stating his case, but not garrulous. He writes sparely and by indirection, and director David Emmes has calibrated his production in SCR’S Second Stage just as astutely.

Performed on Cliff Faulkner’s simple abstract set, with its blanks filled in by Tom Ruzika’s lighting and David Edwards’ sound design, the piece is engrossing and lean.

Martin, as Mrs. Phipps, turns in a ferocious portrait of a physically fragile old woman of great pride and distinction, whose undimmed intelligence alerts her to her limitations, but whose rebellious spirit refuses to cave in. She still revels in the perfection of mathematics, music and the universe, relishes her vibrant recollections of life with a vigorous, mountain-climbing husband and perceives her failing mind as a sometimes frightening inconvenience.

In Walcutt’s angry Tim we see the anguish of a good man torn between loving himself, loving his wife and caring for a stranger who lays no claims on him but whom he simply is not able to abandon. It is a coiled yet sometimes uncommonly tender portrayal.

As the upwardly mobile Ginette, La Russa has the trickiest challenge and mostly pulls it off. Ginette’s single-minded pursuit of a more satisfying career tends to make her come off as a nagging mercenary. But she, like Mrs. Phipps, understands the value and inevitability of change. And Moher makes sure that we see her selfishness as a Darwinian strength.

In a deliberately inconclusive ending, however, he leaves the door open for other opinions. With her wish fulfilled at last, Ginette tellingly admits that the attainment of her goal has been less lustrous than the reaching for it. It is difficult not to admire a playwright who can fly so confidently in the face of his own argument.

* “Odd Jobs,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Dec. 6. $23-$32; (714) 957-4033. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

John Walcutt: Tim Arends

Nan Martin: Mrs. Leonora Phipps

Annie La Russa: Ginette Arends

Director David Emmes. Playwright Frank Moher. Sets Cliff Faulkner. Lights Tom Ruzika. Costumes Ann Bruice. Sound David Edwards. Music consultant Jerry Patch. Production manager Edward Lapine. Stage manager Andy Tighe. Assistant stage manager Randall K. Lum.