‘Circumference’ Wheels From Quirky to Weighty Tone

Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders. Chester bears a bagel.

The central character in “Circumference of a Squirrel” is a 28-year-old graduate student who has lost his bearings. He has dropped out of school and is sitting aimlessly on the campus lawn one afternoon when he catches sight of a scrawny squirrel struggling to haul a bagel up a tree. The image triggers something in Chester’s mind, and suddenly, he drops, Alice-like, into an interior Wonderland in which both squirrel and bagel acquire freighted meaning.

If it were content to be a quirky comedy, the play would come across amiably enough in its test production by the Mark Taper Forum’s Taper, Too new-play laboratory. But several minutes in, just as it’s beginning to elicit warm, genuine laughs, it makes an unannounced turn toward serious drama. From then on, the bagel allegory is more appropriate than playwright John S. Walch probably intended, for neither Chester nor the play itself can bear this new weight.

Walch’s play--the fourth and final of the year’s Taper, Too offerings at the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Hollywood--is written for a solo actor who narrates the story in first person while also portraying sundry other characters.

The actor here, Chris Hogan, is lean and awkward, with an unruly mop of hair and a mouth full of oversized teeth. He looks like a boy who hasn’t quite grown into his adult body--an apt look for Chester, who can’t grow up until he copes with a painful chapter from his past.

Early in Chester’s squirrel-induced flashback, he is a boy soaring high in a tire swing when his barefoot father, who is pushing him, is bitten by a squirrel. Brandishing a retractable metal pointer, Chester--whose graduate studies in microbiology included a stint as a teaching assistant--switches into that mode to supply scientific facts about squirrels and about rabies, against which his dad had to be inoculated. Jabbing the tip of the pointer into his stomach and slowly retracting it, Chester pantomimes the series of painful shots that his father had to endure.

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From then on, Chester’s dad is obsessed with squirrels. At first, he fears them. Then he turns vengeful. Before long, a squirrel holocaust is underway.

It is in the midst of a particularly nasty act of squirrel annihilation that Chester’s image of his father is forever changed. As Chester repeats his father’s thoughtlessly racist remark on that occasion, all the air seems suddenly sucked out of the room. The laughter stops, and the play lurches in a new direction, to become a parable about sons and fathers--in this case, the troubled son of an anti-Semitic father.

Walch’s flair for language sometimes gets him into trouble, since it’s too highfalutin to be issuing from the mouth of an average guy like Chester. Describing the trapped squirrel on that fateful night, for instance, he says: “It looked at me with eyes as wide open as the two O’s in the word horror.”

Director Mark Rucker (whose frequent work at South Coast Repertory includes the recent, well-liked “Much Ado About Nothing”) has coached Hogan well in trying to balance the funny against the frightful, and the actor delivers--despite a few too many line bobbles on opening night. Coming across as earnest and innately decent, Hogan endears himself, even though Chester’s memories remain resolutely blighted to the end.

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* “Circumference of a Squirrel,” Taper, Too at the Actors’ Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., at El Centro Avenue, Hollywood. Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends July 1. $20. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

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Chris Hogan: Chester

A Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum production. Written by John S. Walch. Directed by Mark Rucker. Set: Rachel Hauck. Costumes: Joyce Kim Lee. Lights: Geoff Korf. Music: Norman L. Berman. Sound: Adam Phalen. Production stage manager: Bridget Kirkpatrick.