‘Bechet’ a Cold Examination of the Soul

“Sidney Bechet Killed a Man,” a play about a surgeon gone wrong, is itself coldly surgical, as if playwright Stuart Flack believed he could apply a scalpel to a character’s brain and expose his being.

Philip Litwin is a “preeminent cardiologist,” a husband, father, grandfather, lover of jazz, lover of Melville and lover of his best friend’s wife. He is as unlikely to commit murder as anyone could be. But he does.

In the course of the evening, characters step forward to tell us an awful lot about Philip; people even return from the dead to speak of him. And Philip himself fills us in on many of his deepest thoughts and most heartfelt philosophies. Yet Philip remains as theoretical as a supposition.

In the play, having its West Coast debut at South Coast Repertory’s second stage, Philip does not add up to more than the sum of his carefully calculated parts, though he is played with elegiac dignity by Tony Roberts.

Roberts seems to have arrived at a late-breaking state of grace. The mellow fatuousness he embodied in early Woody Allen films has graduated into something layered and interesting: He has become a worldly citizen with a touch of melancholy, a man who possesses the hard-won ease to soar above earthly troubles while still respecting their power.

Roberts plays a character who, like the actor’s old friend Woody, is a world-famous success who also plays the jazz clarinet in a small bar. Philip’s love of jazz--particularly of jazz saxophonist-clarinetist Sidney Bechet--is as precise and studied as his doctoring, and he draws parallels between them. He is also obsessed by “Moby Dick,” which he reads to the exclusion of all other books.

A saver of lives, Philip is, as Tom Wolfe would say, a master of the universe, and he believes he is entitled to make his own rules. Philip makes a speech about the necessity of adventure and obsession and another about rage and passion as agents of change and stimulation in life. And, though he acts according to those beliefs, there is a noticeable lack of both passion and adventure in this oddly constipated, schematic play.

Flack outfits his hero with a Peyton Place drama to exploit his meditations and send him hurtling toward a no-exit dilemma. A trusted friend and financial advisor, Marcel (an unusually colorless Hal Landon Jr.), betrays Philip and ruins him, financially.

This precipitates an act of violence--and several monologues. The speeches about obsession (“It turns orgasm into little more than a sneeze”) are little more than sound bites, but in the end Flack writes one authentically knell-like reflection for his waning hero.

In this scene, Roberts lures us into Philip’s confessional: He looks like a teddy bear, with his woolly white hair and big ears. He sounds reassuring, with his warm, basso voice. His Philip wears a halo of distinction. Riding on a plane for probably the final time, he looks around him and sees people eating, sleeping, not noticing they are in the midst of the most extraordinary aerodynamic event. At the end of his rope, feeling “deeply ashamed and mortally afraid,” Philip sees this plane ride as a metaphor for how we live our lives. It is a most elegant conclusion, an unhurried epiphany that rings true and throws off the turgidity of most of the writing here.

Director Juliette Carrillo and set designer Rachel Hauck give the play what it calls for: a cool, precise and industrial package. People step forward like chess pieces to give testament to Philip. Among them are his wife, Emily. As played by Barbara Tarbuck, she is a calm, privileged doctor’s wife, the kind who’d feel at ease on the golf course or meeting a president. Her dogged love of Philip in the face of constant infidelity, however, seems not thought-through, as though in the course of an entire life she had never changed in her relation to her husband since the day when she fell in love with him--an idea she actually puts forth.

Rounding out the cast are the intriguing Gail Shapiro, a rubber-faced comedian who plays a number of roles, and Mirron E. Willis, who is also smooth in multiple parts, from a cadaver to an airline pilot to the mythical musician in Philip’s head. If only the playwright had come out of his character’s head and into his heart, the music could really have started.

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* “Sidney Bechet Killed a Man,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 30. $18-$41. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 90 minutes.

Tony Roberts: Philip Litwin

Hal Landon Jr.: Marcel

Barbara Tarbuck: Emily Litwin

Mirron E. Willis: Man, Broker, Policeman, Pilot

Gail Shapiro: Waitress, Nurse, Isabelle, Agent

Alan Priester, Gabe Wolpa: Jerry

A South Coast Repertory production. By Stuart Flack. Directed by Juliette Carrillo. Sets Rachel Hauck. Costumes Joyce Kim Lee. Lights Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz. Sound Mitchell Greenhill. Production manager Michael Mora. Stage manager Randall K. Lum.