STAGE REVIEW : LISTENING TO THE HEART OF ‘HUNTER’

“It is an inward play and the conflicts are inward conflicts,” Carson McCullers once said of her stage adaptation of “The Member of the Wedding.” “It is concerned with the weight of time, the hazard of human existence, bolts of chance. The reactions of the characters to these abstract phenomena project the movement of the play.”

Little did McCullers know then that the same description might one day serve to describe someone else’s stage adaptation of her first novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” written a full quarter-century before. Since the difficulty of communication is at its heart, and one of its pivotal characters is a deaf man--John Singer--one can see why the National Theatre of the Deaf would claim it for its own.

Adapted for the stage by Glenn Berenbeim (who has updated the action to 1938) and presented by the National Theatre of the Deaf, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” is currently on a swing through Southern California that began Monday at Pepperdine’s Smothers Theatre.

Like “Member of the Wedding,” it has the slow internal combustion of prewar life in the rural American South and focuses, among other things, on the pubescent turmoils of Mick Kelly--a tomboy who prefigures “Wedding’s” Frankie Addams, proving that writers rarely stray very far from their central preoccupations.

Still, analogies between “Member of the Wedding” and the Theatre of the Deaf’s “Lonely Hunter” must end there. “Wedding” is a naturalistic play. In form and style, “Hunter” is closer to the barometric pressures and leisurely abstractions of “Our Town” (a play the Theatre of the Deaf tackled in 1979-80). Presented as a blank canvas over which various characters sketch in their own stories, “Hunter” enjoys the advantages and disadvantages of the approach in more or less equal measure: simplicity and suggestion at some expense to sustained interest.

Nevertheless, it’s a legitimate approach when you’re dealing with the panoramic scope of a novel, and the Theatre of the Deaf’s bilingual presentation (in spoken English and American Sign Language) benefits from the visual attraction and physical grace of mimed words. In addition, director J Ranelli has enhanced the novel’s sense of humor with whimsy of his own. There’s a lovely moment, for instance, when a riderless tricycle slowly crosses the stage and Mick indicates: “My little brother.”

Touches such as these (and there are several) go a long way toward concealing some stereotyping and structural predictabilities in the work itself. When all is said and done, the bloom of novelty is also off this quasi-Story Theater type of approach, unless you can do highly original non -naturalistic things with it (such as this company did with “Gilgamesh” and “Parzival, From the Horse’s Mouth”).

While the company is to be commended, historically, for not letting itself be limited by presentational styles, “Hunter’s” basis in realism, even though tackled nontraditonally, does get in the way of a freer imaginative rein.

The overwhelming advantage of all Theatre of the Deaf presentations lies in its special visual/aural language combination and the dedication and high energy of its actors. The company has always had a mix of deaf, hearing-impaired and hearing actors (even if not necessarily the same mix) and their own exultation in the double-edge of their creative/collaborative process communicates itself triumphantly to an audience.

This edition of the company works uniformly well and seamlessly as an ensemble, but a few people manage to stand out. They are Chuck Baird as the mute Antonapoulos, Elena Blue as the mock-tough Mick, Adrian Blue as smiling John Singer and Cathleen Riddley as Portia Copeland.

Let it be emphasized again that this is theater for everyone, to be enjoyed by everyone and not just by one segment of the population.

Performances in Southern California continue tonight at UC Santa Barbara (805-961-3535), Thursday at Citrus College (818-963-9411), Friday at UC Riverside (714-787-4331), Saturday at El Camino College (213-329-5345). “Hunter” then travels to Central California with dates in Merced (Sunday), Visalia (Monday) and Bakersfield (Oct. 30), swinging through San Diego Nov. 1 and 2 (619-230-2800).

‘THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER’ A stage adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel by Glenn Berenbeim, presented by the National Theatre of the Deaf. Artistic director David Hays. Director J Ranelli. Sets and lights David Hays. Costumes Lana Fritz. Cast Chuck Baird, Adrian Blue, Elena Blue, Christopher Grant, Lewis Merkin, Shanny Mow, Edward Porter, Cathleen Riddley, Chaz Struppmann, Andy Vasnick, Sandi Inches, Columbia Velocipede.