THEATER REVIEW : A Performer’s Father Lode

Ritual and tribute are hardly new to the theater. It is natural that they would often surface as concomitants to mourning the loss or honoring the existence of a parent.

Not many years ago, actor Mark Harelik wrote a valentine to his grandfather called “The Immigrant.” Not many months ago, performer Jan Munroe paid homage to his departed father in a stirring show improbably called “Nothing Human Disgusts Me.” Now it’s the turn of another performer--Tony Abatemarco--to throw his hat into the ring.

“Four Fathers,” which opened over the weekend at the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood, is a perplexing title for a one-man show by a performer who wants to tell us principally about one man: his father. But once the lights come up on Abatemarco’s tribute, the plurality is explained.

The “four fathers” have been dredged up from the ranks of Shakespeare and Greek mythology to inform Abatemarco’s ritual tribute to his dad. They are, for the record, Sisyphus, whose endless toil most closely matches Abatemarco pere’s own lifetime of labor; Hermes, messenger of the gods and protector of the unprotected; the ghost of Hamlet’s father; and Daedalus, a father full of guidance and warning about too much sun.

It is the image of Sisyphus pushing the rock that first meets the eye when Ken Booth’s lights dim slowly on Abatemarco fils . Laboriously, he pushes his rock sideways rather than up, but the heft is palpable and the effort great.

The image makes its point.

“There’s got to be an easier way,” are the first sly words out of Abatemarco’s mouth, as he sits on the rock, looking over his shoulder at the audience he has overlooked so far, before embarking on the substance of his dissertation.

His father, the last of 13 kids born to Neapolitan immigrants, was a man contaminated with syphilis who, as part of a growing-up regimen, nightly lit the gas lamps over one square mile of Brooklyn--part of a master plan to overcome frail health at age 12.

This initial sketch offers an engaging picture of a somewhat dour, serious individual who loved deeply with few words and a firm hand--a man to whom perfectionism became second nature and who meted out his affection to his children in the form of indirect advice for the boys and grand Italianate weddings for the girls.

Like a loving and meticulous portraitist, Abatemarco makes his most enriching points by filling in the tiniest, telling details of Life With Father. His brushwork boldly underscores the importance of both the uneventful and the life passages one never forgets. A ride in the car as a boy next to dad becomes an adventure. The pain in the death of a mother is made palpable in a few anguished strokes.

Abatemarco is enough of a wordsmith (his choice of language) to enliven this homage with the painterly devices of poets: ellipsis, imagery, allegory.

As performer, he is precise. As writer, he is spare--a lot more spare than he was at Stages Theatre in Hollywood a few months ago when he first tried out this piece on an audience. Perhaps it was his director, Don Amendolia, who insisted on the rigorous editing, but it is just as likely that Abatemarco himself refined and whittled down the material to its present rarefied state.

“Four Fathers” is a highly verbal, even literary, piece that on occasion borrows from liturgical chant with as much impunity as it does from the upstart convenience of rap. The latter seems a stooping to trendiness that the piece neither needs nor deserves. Barring this reservation, this hourlong manifestation of affection is a distinctive entry by a distinguished artist in the annals of processed pain.

*”Four Fathers,” Tiffany Theatre, 8432 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursday-Saturday, also June 19, 24-26, July 2-3, 8-10, 16, 22-24, 8 p.m.; Sunday, also June 20, 27, July 11, 18, 25, 3 p.m.; July 18, 7:30 p.m. Ends July 25. $22-$24; (310) 289-2999. Running time: 1 hour,5 minutes.