Theatre in Review: Good With People (59E59)

	Blythe Duff, Anderw Scott-Ramsay. Photo: Carol Rosegg

A middle-aged woman working the welcome desk at a seaside hotel has an oddly tense encounter with a young male guest in Good With People, an initially intriguing but ultimately enervated two-hander by David Harrower that kicks off this year's Brits Off Broadway series. Her curt manner -- not to mention an extended wrangle over the registration form and her marked reluctance to serve him a drink -- hardly seems like the way to win customers in a town where tourism has dried up. ("We raise our hopes every year, and we're fools," she tells us.) As it happens, the two of them have a bit of a shared past.

Helen is a lifelong resident of Helensburgh, Scotland, once a spa town and now the home of a fleet of British nuclear submarines. The presence of the latter rankles the locals, who have vigorously protested being made to living in proximity to weapons of mass destruction. Evan, her unwelcome customer, was a child of the naval base and, growing up, he felt the chill of the townspeople. "The school didn't want us, easy to tell that," he says. "We'd get chased if we were on our own. Mickey taken out of our accents."

But the real reason for the tension on stage has to do with a long-ago incident in which Evan and his friends abducted Helen's son and stripped him naked, leaving him to wander home. This isn't one of those plays where everyone hashes over the sins of the past, however. Even Helen admits that the incident had only a passing effect on her son, and, in any case, Evan is no thug; having trained as a nurse, he has been working as a volunteer for the Red Cross in Peshawar. ("Volunteering sets me apart from the herds of stupid, incompetent nurses that roam the wards of Britain," he notes with some bitterness.) Both are marked by a sense of alienation: Helen has a bad case of empty-nest syndrome and Evan, who has returned to attend his divorced parents' remarriage, feels at home nowhere.

Despite its initial hints of conflict, however, Good With People isn't really interested in drama or even conventional storytelling. It is merely a study of two lives that have been shaped by events well beyond their control. Helen resents how the town's destiny has been altered by the fleet, and furthermore fears that she is losing her son. Evan has embraced the healing arts but must deal with the morally confusing world of the Middle East. For pragmatic reasons, he tends to members of the Taliban. ("If we looked after them, it meant the Red Cross could work in Pakistan and Afghanistan without reprisals.") For his good work, he is criticized by his patients, who loathe Western culture, and is beaten up by insurgents patrolling the hospital.

Harrower, whose other, better works include Blackbird and A Slow Air, has a fine eye for the telling detail, but Good With People is a perilously thin piece, a pair of character portraits in search of a play. The initial tension between Helen and Evan dissipates as it becomes clear that nothing is going to happen between them; a hint of sexual attraction (at least on Helen's part) proves even less fruitful. Basically, the two of them come together, tell their stories, and part, unchanged; even at a running time of just under an hour, the action feels stretched to the limit. The director, George Perrin, has apparently added several sequences between the scenes, not accounted for in the script, that seem intended to give the action some extra weight. (In one, for example, Evan opens a beer bottle and pours sand all over himself.) All they do, however, is add an unearned feeling of portentousness.

Perrin is much better with the actors. Early on, Blythe Duff invests each of Helen's lines with a barely hidden aggression, giving way later on to a persuasive feeling of paralysis. Andrew Scott-Ramsay makes an adept verbal fencing partner, by turns tough-minded and oddly vulnerable. Both have mastered the art of the pregnant pause; it would be interesting to see them in something by Pinter - The Room, perhaps.

Ben Stones' design consists of an oriental rug and an overturned chair, but every moment has been carefully and beautifully shaped by Tim Deiling's lighting, which carves out surprisingly intimate tableaux from a near-empty stage and makes proficient use of shadows. Equally accomplished is Scott Twynholm's sound design, which mixes the distant sound of bagpipe chords with bits of the Moonlight Sonata and the calls of seagulls on a beach.

As a portrait of displaced persons -- displaced in their own lives -- Good With People benefits from Harrower's honesty and observant eye, but the lack of significant action results in an atmosphere of stasis. Harrower is good with people, but, in this case, not so good with drama.--David Barbour