THEATER REVIEW : Painting Telling Portraits With Spare ‘Brush Strokes’

Barren landscapes populated by lost and forlorn people, steeped in mysterious everyday sorrow.

Those qualities in Edward Hopper’s paintings inspired playwright-director Susan J. Emshwiller to create “Brush Strokes,” a set of one-act plays at the Met Theatre based on six of the artist’s lesser-known paintings.

The spectacularly successful results are due in part to Emshwiller’s ingenuity in extracting scenarios ripe with drama from telling clues in Hopper’s cryptic portraits. But just as important is the evocative visual composition in her staging. Hopper aficionados will appreciate the fidelity of detail, color and tone--a triumph for set designer Kelly Deco and scene painter Rebeca Lee Roberts.

Emshwiller also brings enviable economy and precision to her scripting. There isn’t a wasted word in dialogue that reveals entire histories without recourse to expository narration.

The structural immediacy is established in the first episode, “Hotel by a Railroad.” We piece together the invented scenario from distracted snippets of conversation on the morning after a one-night stand.

The man (David Clennon) is about to board a train out of town. The woman’s (Lynn Milgrim’s) reaction to the discovery that he’s married tells us all we need to know about the strategies and concealments of the evening before. But she has some surprises of her own that undermine his smug self-satisfaction as the conquering manipulator, and end the scene on a satisfying note of tables turned.

Even more sparse and enigmatic is the second-half opener, “Sea Watchers,” in which an argument between a couple at the beach pits the man’s (William Mesnik’s) rational attempts at definition against the woman’s (Maxine Fay James’) hostility to language, until a simple, understated gesture bridges their communication impasse.

Other scenes offer more elaborate story lines, though at times their complexity clashes with the paintings’ arid stasis. In “Four Lane Road,” the drudgery of daily chores erupts into a fierce confrontation between the abusive owner (David Schultz) of a desolate highway gas station and his defiant son (David Joseph). While the story eventually dovetails nicely with the painted scene, the dramatic distance required to get there exceeds the performers’ naturalistic boundaries, and a closing pun only underscores the melodramatic artifice.

Even greater liberties are taken with the event-driven caper scenario brought to “Room in New York.” The plot seems better suited to “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” than to a portrait of Americana, but eerie performances from Susan Lee Hoffman and Mark Brady make for an unsettling and effective episode.

The best balance between a source painting and the play’s interpretive license is “Hotel Room.” Wayne Pere is brilliant as the sinister charmer who plays on the innocence of Kim Gillingham’s heartbroken naif. The scene ends without a final resolution (very true to the tone of a Hopper painting), but we can see from Pere’s momentary look of regret where things are headed.

The concluding “Western Hotel” takes its surprisingly affirmative, upbeat spirit from the only painting in which the subject, a calm, self-confident woman, looks directly back at the viewer. While Tom Bower could have found more levels to his role as her companion, Martha Gehman turns the scene into a celebration of feminine resuscitation a la Molly Bloom--voicing the author’s eloquent rebuttal to Hopper’s somber despair.

* “Brush Strokes,” Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Runs indefinitely. $12. (213) 957-1152. Running time: 2 hours.