STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Sitting Man’: Atmospheric Interrogation

“Sitting Man,” the new Carol Kaplan play at the Pacific Theatre Ensemble, has a loaded title.

The only other character in the piece is called Standing Man. He’s the interrogator. Sitting Man is the prisoner. The event of the play is never explained, but its dynamics are explicit: Standing/sitting; top/bottom; over/under; male/female; powerful/powerless.

This is not the first interrogation play to hit the stage and, given the way the world works, it is not likely to be the last. Andre Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault launched the existential idea of this kind of drama with their 1950s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Like Harold Pinter’s “Mountain Language” and Ellen McLaughlin’s “Days and Nights Within,” South African playwright Kaplan’s “Sitting Man” focuses on the tactics of deliberate obfuscation and other mental and physical cruelties that erode identity. Short of death itself, blind imprisonment, which implies torture, is the most fundamental violation of life. Darkness, cold, thirst, temptation, suggestion and unreason are some of the ways to create ultimate disorientation.

But, like the Pinter and McLaughlin plays, “Sitting Man” does not escape the confines of its premise. Where it excels is in the spareness of its dialogue, its ratchety succession of short blackout scenes, and the sterling performance of Scott Allan Campbell as the tacit prisoner.

If ever there was a play of reaction rather than action, this is it. It is also a play of atmospherics. Greg Howard’s sound design, which runs the gamut from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” to unsettling forms of percussion, is a dismaying component in the establishment of fear. And set designer Robert W. Zentis has devised a way to put the theatergoer in prison by screening in the audience. His lighting finishes the work, more efficiently than the lone table and chair that sometimes fill the empty playing space.

William Hayes, who plays the tormentor, is to the ways of prison almost born, since the five years he spent in a Turkish jail led to his writing of “Midnight Express.”

In the visits he pays the tongue-tied prisoner, Hayes plays it cool and deliberately colorless, seeming almost weak at first in relation to Campbell’s reproving presence. But as his tactics become less concealed, and as Campbell is asked to hold a chair above his head or is offered water that is then dispensed drop by drop or is stripped naked (to safeguard him from himself), Hayes’ Standing Man takes on a certain incontrovertible force as the banal embodiment of pure evil.

It is a terrible game of cat and mouse that he plays: first suggesting, then denying, that he has had sex with Sitting Man’s wife; then declaring the wife to be dead, yet leaving room for doubt; or implying that the prisoner is about to be released, yet finding excuses to withhold him at every step.

It gives the play its forward motion, with Hayes’ fragile dominance as Standing Man in fact catalyzing Campbell’s growing hold on the play as Sitting Man.

The mystique of the strong, silent type works as mysteriously here as it does in life. One attributes to Sitting Man a power he may not have, but there’s no mistaking the ravaging breakdown that transforms and uplifts him.

Veronica Brady’s direction catches all the nuances, even if ultimately there is no avoiding the formulaic boundaries. A one-on-one interrogation is a one-on-one interrogation. It stretches in only so many ways, and a day or three’s growth of beard plus a little dirt might have made the circumstances of Campbell’s incarceration more persuasive. But as an example of a genre, “Sitting Man” builds fear, revulsion and anguish a lot better than most.

* “Sitting Man,” Pacific Theatre Ensemble, 8780 Venice Blvd., Culver City. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends March 7. $15; (213) 660-8587). Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Plenty of Rough Going in ‘Rough Crossing’

It seems to be more than a casual mystery just when Tom Stoppard decided to freely adapt Ferenc Molnar’s immensely popular comedy, “Play at the Castle,” into a Noel Coward-ish comedy of his own retitled “Rough Crossing.”

The information doesn’t surface in the usual places, but the adaptation has been published by Samuel French and minor investigating uncovered that it was first performed at London’s National Theatre in 1984.

So much for the conjecture that this play might be early Stoppard.

In the pedigreed production that has just surfaced at the Matrix Theatre, “Rough Crossing” is . . . well, rough. It aspires to the brittle Art Deco sophistication of the ‘30s, becoming something of a pastiche of Coward’s “Sail Away,” Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” and the best shipboard extravaganzas of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

What’s wrong with it is that it simply tries too hard. Its top-heavy plot involves a pair of writer-producers (Ian Abercrombie and Bill Cort) who are rehearsing a Broadway operetta on a transatlantic voyage.

Among the things they have to contend with is the absence of a suitable third act and the presence of their French composer Adam (Anthony Cistaro)--a man with a serious speech impediment engaged to their leading lady Natasha (Deborah Van Valkenburgh).

Natasha is not only temperamental, but was once involved with her leading man Ivor (Ian Ogilvy), a bit of an aging bounder whose uninvited advances, overheard by Adam, wreak havoc with the plot.

Things gets entirely too complicated to be explained (they can barely be understood) and are overlaid with the shenanigans of a meddling waiter named Dvornichek (John Apicella) whose sea-legs leave a lot to be desired.

Everyone huffs and puffs to keep the humor afloat, but in fact there isn’t enough substance in this comedy of missed cues, word play and intrigue to sustain its running time.

Director Richard Kline, who staged a delicious “Present Laughter” with Ogilvy two years ago at the Melrose, is no more able than his able cast to overcome the absurd convolutions of this second act. Spontaneous laughter springs from spontaneous mishaps. These are simply overwrought.

The result is that the actors feel bound to compensate, and while such consummate players as Cort, Abercrombie, Apicella and Ogilvy know better, they fall into the same trap as the less adept Van Valkenburgh and Cistaro. Cistaro, in fact, has some delicious moments forcing the words out of his mouth, but everyone in the production overreaches.

What may have seemed hilarious on paper is merely frenetic on stage. Andre Previn is credited with some charming incidental music (Tom Shell is musical director), and Lee Fisher has provided a credible Art Deco shipboard setting, though attempts by the cast to look as if they’re being tossed around by rough seas are never persuasive. People collide, but intent, effort and words simply don’t come together.

* “Rough Crossing,” Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends March 7. $18.50-22.50; (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours.