Theater : ‘Ganesh’ a Rich Journey Into Land of The Other

Travel teaches toleration, said Benjamin Disraeli. For the 60ish Connecticut matrons who explore India in Terrence McNally’s “A Perfect Ganesh,” travel also exposes the limits of tolerance, and offers a chance to confront The Other--the stranger both without and within.

This rich 1993 play, as surprising and sometimes as endless as travel itself, is making its West Coast debut at the Ensemble Theatre Company of Santa Barbara.

Margaret (Gretchen Evans) and Katharine (Sylvia Short) have perhaps subconsciously chosen India for their two-week jaunt because it is a country full of death and spiritual rebirth, two subjects which they are both very much in need of considering.

Their journey is watched over by the benevolent elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha (Dan Gunther), who takes many forms, from a Japanese tourist offering unexpected kindness, to an Indian child who possesses eerie knowledge of Katharine’s dead son, Walter, a casualty in a horrific gay-bashing incident.

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In fact, the play is overloaded with past, present and even future tragedy in the lives of these uneasy friends. Katharine is an outwardly enthusiastic grandmotherly woman whose seminar-trained enthusiasm (“There is only one me!”) belies the isolation and suspicion set in her heart by her son’s murder and, before that, by the fact of his homosexuality.

Margaret, more circumspect than her friend, confesses her misfortunes only to strangers. Short and Evans steer the play away from soap opera by making each tragedy specific.

These two excellent actresses also handle the play’s difficult shifts from dialogue to internal monologue. McNally has developed a kind of direct address--not quite aside, not quite soliloquy (also used in “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” and “Love! Valour! Compassion!”)--to illuminate the place beyond all irony where people speak with entire frankness.

This X-ray of the characters’ inner lives is not always effective. When the dead Walter (Christopher Vore) returns to appraise his mother, his monologue sounds generic (it’s also more self-pitying than we would hope of the dead): “She should have loved me not just for falling down and scraping my knee when I was a little boy,” he says, “but for standing tall when I was a young man and telling her I loved other men. She should have loved me when my heart was breaking for the love of them.”

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This is a play that crosses the line from daring to self-indulgent and back again. The long string of characters played by Gunther (who manages to be extremely eloquent with most of his face covered by an elephant head) and Vore is theatrical and fun. The progress of the women is unpredictable and seems part of a long--lifelong--process of change. Evans particularly does a marvelous job with the maturing of Margaret. She mellows as she becomes less repressed, and we see more of her discreet but lovely Vivien Leigh-like smile.

Director Robert Grande-Weiss has delivered a smart reading of a complex play. Robert L. Smith’s simple set, which provides numerous panels and cut-out doorways by which actors and stagehands enter and exit, helps paint a mood of unexpected arrivals and constant flux.

Strangely, the play’s crucial scene seems to lack the courage of its convictions. Katharine finds herself alone with a child and with her grief on a river bank, screaming out the obscene names used by the men who beat her son to death. Then, she screams out an equally hateful name for the African American men who killed her son. This is a harrowingly honest moment, and one that hints at the possibility of transcendence of hate. Short falters while delivering that final, talismanic obscenity. It would be impossible to expunge a word that you seem to be swallowing.

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“A Perfect Ganesh,” Ensemble Theatre Company, 914 Santa Barbara St., Santa Barbara, Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends March 5. $15-$20. (805) 962-8606. Group tickets, (800) 398-0722. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes. Dan Gunther: Ganesha

Christopher Vore: Man

Gretchen Evans: Margaret Civil

Sylvia Short: Katharine Brynne

An Ensemble Theatre Company of Santa Barbara production. By Terrence McNally. Directed by Robert Grande-Weiss. Sets by Robert L. Smith. Lighting by Robert Fromer. Costumes by Barbara Lackner. Sound by Kevin Kelly. Movement by Valerie Huston. Production stage manager Stephen Bowman.