‘Stones in His Pockets’ Gets By as Actors’ Showcase

Co-dependent in the extreme, Los Angeles is like most American cities: Its theaters continually look to New York for validation and next year’s small-cast, one-set properties. New York, meanwhile, looks to London. Some Broadway seasons, you swear you’d been kidnapped and plunked on a Virgin Atlantic flight direct to the West End.

London has its own sources--Scotland’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival among them. Though Marie Jones’ “Stones in His Pockets” was born and bred in Ireland, it proved a hit of the 1999 Edinburgh Fringe, which paved the way for its London premiere.

All along the way, “Stones in His Pockets” has served as a showcase for Sean Campion and Conleth Hill, the joyously good Irish actors who elevate this slight, rickety comedy to something that nearly takes your mind off the question: Is it enough for Broadway?

The play isn’t, really. The performers are.

Zipping in and out of 13 different roles and at least three nationalities, the tall, engagingly modest Campion (whose voice has that mellow Liam Neeson quality) works in effortless tandem with the shorter, stouter Hill (whose grin suggests a County Kerry Jonathan Winters). Jones’ two-man piece is about a Hollywood “fillum” crew disrupting a coastal patch of County Kerry, during the making of a schlock epic titled “The Quiet Valley.”

The two main characters of “Stones,” if not of “The Quiet Valley,” are Jake and Charlie, employed as extras. Charlie (Hill), former unsuccessful video shop owner, has a script he wants to slip to one of the movie people. Jake (Campion), recently back from America, one night catches the eye of Caroline Giovanni, the dialect-challenged star, eager for guidance from a genuine “uncomplicated” local.

As Jones introduces her full complement--starlet, assistants, puffy English director, the aged, stooped Mickey, “one of the few surviving extras on ‘The Quiet Man’ “--the play strives for resonance. The callous outsiders pay little mind to the dreams harbored by the Kerry folk. A peripheral character--young, unstable Sean, overzealous in his starry-eyed ardor--drowns himself after being tossed out of the pub following a run-in with the movie star’s security goon. (Hence the title: He drowned himself by placing stones in his pockets.)

Jones lays into the Tinseltown hypocrisies and cruel ironies with a heavy paw, at odds with her better, more characterful writing. (The play treats Hollywood imperialist insensitivity as if it was a bad thing.) As directed by the dramatist’s husband, Ian McElhinney, the show mitigates some of the strenuousness with a disarmingly relaxed quality, looser and easier-breathing than you’d expect from a two-man, many-characters vehicle. Yet it’s remarkable the play has come this far saddled with such a faulty final half-hour. Charlie and Jake have it out, patch it up and set about writing a screenplay based on what’s happened to them, and to their late mate, Sean. There’s a shorter, tighter “Stones” dying to get out from under its current protracted incarnation.

The problems fade whenever the actors are really cooking, which is often. Act 1 ends with an uproarious on-set sequence, a turf-digging scene involving the extras, and the sight of Campion’s wildly enthusiastic shoveling technique is a wonder. Though she’s a hackneyed satiric target, the calculatedly seductive starlet Caroline, as sketched by Hill, gets a surprising number of laughs. Jones’ better details have a nice sharp quality, as when Caroline complains of her “dingly dangly” earrings.

The play, which received its U.S. premiere in 1999 at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, is itself a bit dingly dangly. But the weaknesses and repetitions are forgiven when, during the filming of a village celebration, Campion and Hill perform their most fervent “Riverdance” routine. It’s enough to make Michael “Feet of Flames” Flatley think about canceling his New York engagement.

* “Stones in His Pockets,” Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St., New York City. $30-$70. (800) 432-7250.