Artful Longing for Brighter Times in Gloomy ‘Nostalgia’

In the theater, the word “nostalgia” usually has a sunny glow. Nostalgic plays often show us earlier times through rose-colored lenses.

Not so with Lucinda Coxon’s “Nostalgia,” in its premiere at South Coast Repertory, which commissioned it. Although the play is set in 1919, it’s definitely not a valentine to the beginning of the Roaring ‘20s. Coxon focuses on the pain and sorrow of unsatisfied longing--and the yearning is not necessarily for a happier past, but also for a brighter future.

In other words, this is one gloomy play. Artfully gloomy, yes, but the artfulness is part of the problem. Despite their apparently roiling passions, the characters appear to be imprisoned almost as much by a self-conscious lyricism as they are by their own woeful circumstances.

Two brothers--young adults--share a farm in South Wales. Will (Michael James Reed) is the older and the bossier, although he sporadically suffers from consumption. Tom (Daniel Blinkoff) appears to do much of the hard labor, but he also chafes under his big brother’s command, drinks too much and casts his wandering eye across the river.

There lives Buddug (Susannah Schulman), a woman alone. She sometimes tends the brothers’ sheep on her land, but there is no bridge across the river. She steers a raft to the other side when they do business.

Will avoids contact with Buddug as much as possible, which may be part of the reason why Tom is so attracted to her.

Buddug’s father was a Sin Eater--who, in Welsh tradition, was an outcast who was appointed to eat the bread and salt that were placed on fresh corpses. The sins of the dead were supposedly absorbed into the bread and salt and were then transferred to the Sin Eater, who received coins as recompense for his complete ostracism from society.

Buddug is not an active practitioner of her father’s trade, but she has acquired a similar social taint. To make ends meet through the long winters, she entertains men in her bedroom for money. No wonder she’s always washing her sheets and hanging them out to dry.

Into this bleak terrain comes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Larry Drake), the celebrated creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle is a leading advocate of Spiritualism and will soon lecture on the subject in nearby Cardiff. He finds the brothers for a reason--Will has written to Doyle to let him know that Doyle’s dead son spoke, via Will, at a seance.

Will now hesitates to say much of anything else about the seance, but Doyle presses him into revealing the unsettling substance of the dead man’s words. Doyle also gets to know Tom and eventually Buddug, from whom he senses some psychic energy.

Coxon has drawn an intriguing psychological landscape, but the various parts don’t cohere well. The play’s climax, involving the forward-looking Tom and Buddug, could easily have happened even if Doyle had not shown up. Will is such a sourpuss that his participation in the pre-play seance seems uncharacteristic; he never sufficiently explains why he went.

Many of the most dramatic events--the seance, the deaths of the brothers’ parents and Doyle’s son--happened before the play begins. While we learn more about these events during the play, Coxon appears to deliberately avoid playing Sherlock Holmes--she doesn’t want everything tied up neatly by the end. This decision could lead to an enveloping sense of mystery, but here the mystery feels too abstractly planned.

In Juliette Carrillo’s staging, Myunghee Cho’s set reinforces the sense of abstraction; the neat geometric shapes of the river, the raft, the sheets seem designed to undercut the sense of messy, uncontrolled mystery that the play’s content suggests. Some of this sense of chaos is evoked by Christopher Webb’s metallic, intermittent sound design, but it’s a little too intermittent to make much of an impression.

Drake’s Doyle, dressed in an enormous suit, is a vivid creation, even if he isn’t successfully integrated into the play’s texture. He has a richly suggestive and amusing dream monologue about his clothes, in which he expresses some of his own sense of groping for his individual identity. Blinkoff and Schulman stir up a sense of some urgency in trying to reach Tom’s inner identity, but Reed never quite overcomes the limits of his underwritten role.

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“Nostalgia,” South Coast Repertory Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Sundays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 2. $27-$51. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 2 hours.

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‘Nostalgia’

Susannah Schulman: Buddug

Daniel Blinkoff: Tom

Michael James Reed: Will

Larry Drake: Arthur

By Lucinda Coxon. Directed by Juliette Carrillo. Set by Myunghee Cho. Costumes by Alex Jaeger. Lighting by John Martin. Sound by Christopher Webb. Stage manager Vanessa J. Noon.