THEATER REVIEW : One for the ‘Road’ Would Have Sufficed

The umbrella title for the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble’s one-act pair may be “Two for the Road,” but this road must be an interstate. These two plays aren’t even in the same time zone.

If the purpose is to display versatility--both between the one-acts as well as between this effort and the Vanguard’s last production, “Othello”--then it’s a rather telling and distinctive success. But how do you explain linking a light, slightly half-witted comedy on marriage pressures such as Don Gordon’s “Normal Doesn’t Mean Perfect” with the poetic Irish tragedy of John Millington Synge’s “Riders to the Sea”?

You can’t. You could strain the conceptual muscles and say that behind Gordon’s tussle-in-the-park and Synge’s drama of the fate of fishermen on Ireland’s Aran Island is the universal battle between men’s independence and women’s need for security. But it misses both pieces by a long mile, overglossing one (Gordon’s) and undercutting the other (Synge’s). These two don’t belong together, on any road.

But what is worthy here, “Riders to the Sea,” comes as such a shock after the creaky sitcom-style banter before it that it is like a bolt from the blue.

“Normal” is a very long warm-up, but it’s worth the wait for the company’s powerful “Riders.”

Gordon’s comedy has been around awhile; it popped up in 1970 (interesting, since the gang element indicates this is hardly a recent problem), and later in 1989 at the Burbage Theatre in West Los Angeles. Though reportedly trimmed this time, “Normal” remains the same long affair about a menage a trois with every comedic turn undercut by too much babble.

And by too much of the Irvine playwright’s manipulative hand. That’s the sense immediately, as Leonard (Michael Allen) explains to tough Diane (Wendy Abas) that he isn’t actually a cop, even though he’s dressed like one and has just run off a bunch of gang members. (Come to think of it, this is dated: Many gangsters today would wipe out a guy like Leonard in an instant.) It turns out that Leonard is going to a charity costume ball with his wife, Winnie (Christie D’Zurilla), and he’s just trying out the uniform.

Thus begins the far-fetchedness, which ultimately resembles a bad “Love, American Style” episode. Of course, Winnie comes to the park (twice, no less), and even though Leonard has duties back home--and even though he keeps reminding Diane of those duties--he keeps hanging around, talking.

If this had a scintilla of credibility and wasn’t a case of a writer commanding his characters rather than of them taking on some will of their own, then the piece’s message of what makes a marriage valuable would carry weight. As it is, “Normal” is weightless, and director Terry Gunkel’s cast hasn’t found a way to fatten it up.

On the other hand, director Elizabeth Swenson’s cast seems to spiritually bond with Synge’s quiet, grim “Riders to the Sea.”

Playwrights, and probably anyone else, in the audience will instantly notice the contrast to what has come before. Here, at last, characters are grounded in their actions and act as mythical forces. “Riders,” written in 1903, has often been compared to Sophocles’ tragedies of passion, fate and ritual, but the brief work is also Synge’s theatrical response to his own time among the Aran people, which he described in his prose work, “The Aran Islands.”

Synge, witnessing the burial of seafaring husbands and sons by the surviving women, wrote that the place was filled with “the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas” and that the grieving women “shriek with pitiable despair.”

Led by Laurel Kelsh in an astonishing performance as the grieving mother certain of her son’s watery fate, the actors (Cheryl Etzel and Sarah Lang as the daughters, Joseph Bowman as the son) seem at times possessed by Synge’s fervent language.

There is something more as well: the sense of undying faith in a God more merciless than an invading army, a transcendent attachment to a harsh divine will. Kelsh’s face combines this and Synge’s pronounced fatalism in the same, awe-struck moment.

* “Two for the Road,” Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, 699A S. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5 p.m. Ends Nov. 20. $10-$14. (714) 526-8007. 1 hour, 50 minutes.

“Normal Doesn’t Mean Perfect”

Wendy Abas: Diane Linda Marie Barker

Michael Allen: Leonard Stillwell

Christie D’Zurilla: Winnie Stillwell

Don Gordon’s comedy, directed by Terry Gunkel.

“Riders to the Sea”

Laurel Kelsh: Maurya

Cheryl Etzel: Nora

Sarah Lang: Kathleen

Joseph Bowman: Bartley

John Millington Synge’s tragedy, directed by Elizabeth Swenson.