A Show That Gathers No Moss

They are two American actors who arrived unexpectedly in London via New York City and Belfast, took on the roles of more than a dozen Irish peasants, and are preparing to land in San Diego before leaving for San Francisco, Delaware, Connecticut and elsewhere.

Talk about a shrinking global village.

“It’s a whole new weird adventure for this play and for us,” said Bronson Pinchot, who with Christopher Burns is starring in the international hit “Stones in His Pockets.”

Fresh from a four-month stint on London’s West End, the two actors are preparing to kick off the U.S. touring production, with a stop first at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego for a Feb. 3-March 16 run.

“Stones in His Pockets” takes place in a small Irish town, where a Hollywood film crew is shooting a soon-to-be-forgotten epic called “The Quiet Valley.” The story is told through the eyes and words of two characters, Jake and Charlie, who infiltrate the set and express aspirations of stardom and an escape from normality.

“This is a very accessible play,” said director Ian McElhinney, speaking from the West End theater where “Stones” recently closed. “It doesn’t appear to have a target audience but enjoys universal appeal.”

Besides Jake and Charlie, Pinchot and Burns play several other characters, including a prissy American starlet and numerous Irish locals with varying opinions on the production.

The multiple characters observe the film production with combinations of ecstasy, awe, jealousy, rage and indifference. One of the characters desires desperately to act, but after a humiliating rejection from the film company, lines his pockets with stones and jumps in a pond. There is also a comical ode, of sorts, to “Riverdance.”

For Pinchot and Burns, the road to San Diego has been far from direct.

“I had this odd feeling, as soon as I auditioned, that things would become strange,” Pinchot said in a telephone interview from London.

Pinchot’s premonition was correct. He and Burns originally signed to take over the show on Broadway, where it had opened at the Golden Theatre on April 1, 2001, earning three Tony nominations, including best actor for originating cast members Sean Campion and Conleth Hill.

“Stones,” written by McElhinney’s wife, Marie Jones, was first produced at the Lyrick Theatre in Belfast in 1999. After playing at the Edinburgh Festival and opening in London that same year, it moved to the West End in May 2000. It has also played with different actors in different languages in San Francisco, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Iceland, Sweden and Japan.

Late last summer, Pinchot and Burns were hired to take over for Campion and Hill in the Broadway production.

“Before I was even cast,” Pinchot said, “I said to Ian, ‘I don’t know how serious you are about me, but I want you to know that if I were to take this, I must go to Ireland. I need to hear and see these people.’ Ian left the room for a while, and when he came back he said, ‘OK.’ We went to Belfast and never came back.”

What kept the actors abroad, indirectly, were the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Broadway went dark for two days after the attack, and box office takes suffered considerably in the weeks that followed. As a result, “Stones in His Pockets” closed Sept. 23, and the show moved back to the West End for a temporary run before its regional launch in the U.S.

The productions are watched over by Tony-nominated director McElhinney, who infuses a common value into each production. “The appeal of the play has long been the notion of where self-worth comes from,” McElhinney said. “How do others perceive you and how do you perceive yourself?

“These two guys are ordinary lads with no sense of self-worth, who somehow find that in the arrival of this film crew. Everybody can identify with the questions of who am I and what am I doing here. It’s a staple of drama and literature.”

By putting these questions within the alluring facade of a Hollywood movie, “Stones in His Pockets” also latches onto provincial impressions of movieland glamour, with dreams shattered along the way, despite the many laughs.

“The film versus reality thing is an appealing context,” McElhinney said. “There’s a dimension of colonialism or imperialism involving American film worldwide. There’s the whole perception of Americans or Brits staying in Ireland for any length of time. There’s the viewpoint that damage can occur in some degree by people having their economic and spiritual worlds taken over for a period.”

The play offers good laughs, Burns says, but digs deeper in its attempts to say something pertinent about the little guy.

“Everyone tells Jake and Charlie that their dream is no good,” he said. “But things end with hope and possibilities. With everything that’s going on in the world right now, that’s an important message.”

Stage veteran Burns, whose credits include “Pride’s Crossing” at Lincoln Center and “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” at the Atlantic Theatre in New York, also enjoys the digs at Hollywood.

“We all have a love affair with Hollywood,” Burns said. “But what if the bubble is popped? Besides that, it’s just fun to play characters who all have a different take on movies and dreams and Ireland. How many actors get to play eight or nine characters in the same show?”

Pinchot, perhaps best known as Balki in the 1986-93 television series “Perfect Strangers,” is also an experienced stage actor, who appeared in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Putting It Together” in 1998 at the Mark Taper Forum and on Broadway in 1999, and who played Autolycus in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s “The Winter’s Tale” last year.

He says that London audiences embraced the two American actors, as did American audience members who saw the show in London.

“We would ask them to tell us what they honestly thought,” Pinchot said. “They would say it took them a few minutes to understand the accent--just like it took us. The accent is so complicated, and that’s why I had to hear it right away. It’s not the Lucky Charms accent. It’s a really strange one that sounds almost Scottish.”

Pinchot traveled to an extreme northern region of Ireland two weeks ago to further study the people and their speech patterns. “My dialect coach had told me about one consonant that was very different, and I just couldn’t believe it,” Pinchot said. “It was making a ‘sh’ sound for an s, as in, ‘Let’s go out for a shteak.’ I went to this small Irish town and that sound was one of the first two words I heard.”

He and Burns won’t be adapting their accents for the U.S. run, however. “The best way is just to leave it as is,” he said. “If people sit there silently, then maybe we’ll need some changes.”

McElhinney suggests audiences will get it. “If we had done the play 10 years ago, Irish references might have gone over American heads, and American references over Irish heads,” he said. “But it’s amazing how quickly that has changed. Internet, videos and DVD have become the new literature, and we all know about each other.”

After San Diego, “Stones in His Pockets” moves to San Francisco, Wilmington, Del., Hartford, Conn., and other cities, with the present cast on contract through May.

There have been preliminary talks about a Los Angeles run, perhaps at the Mark Taper Forum, McElhinney said. A spokeswoman at the Taper confirmed that the talks are preliminary, with 20 to 25 plays still under consideration for next season, including “Stones in his Pockets.”

Wherever it lands in the world, the director--whose knowledge of the piece was intimate from the beginning--says people will see the work as a mirror.

“It’s about us,” McElhinney said. “Marie used muscular, poetic and funny language to establish that pipe dreams can screw your head up as well as enhance your future.”

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“STONES IN HIS POCKETS”, Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Dates: Opens today. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends March 16. Prices: $25-$50. Phone: (619) 239-2255.

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Dan Bennett is an occasional contributor to Calendar