STAGE REVIEW : Seattle Rep’s ‘Playboy’ Lacks Power, Pathos

SAN DIEGO —  In 1907, the debut of John Millington Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” provoked a riot in Ireland’s Abbey Theatre because of its cynical vision of human nature.

No such disturbance occurred here Friday night, where the new Poway Center for the Performing Arts hosted a performance long on technical wizardry, but short on power and pathos.

And such a disappointment, given that this touring show is a production of the Seattle Repertory Theatre, which won the Tony Award for outstanding regional theater Sunday.

The show now moves to the Norris Theatre in Palos Verdes tonight, the Smothers Theatre at Pepperdine University on Thursday and the Big Bear Lake Performing Arts Center on Saturday and Sunday.

Perhaps it was largely a case of dashed expectations. Not only has the Seattle Rep emerged as one of the most respected theaters in the country, but in the last decade it has fed Broadway such hits as “The Heidi Chronicles,” “Eastern Standard,” “Largely New York” and “I’m Not Rappaport.”

In this production, the Rep is at its best in evoking a mood, that of a small Irish county in the early part of the century. From the accents, to the gritty costumes by Michael Olich, to Marjorie Bradley Kellogg’s warm and woody pub, we’re awash in detail.

But it muffles the beating heart of a powerful story--about a lad who attains fame and near-fortune when he announces he has murdered his father. For most of its 2 1/2 hours, this “Playboy” raises nary an eyebrow.

Maybe it’s because of the distraction of trying to decipher the thick Irish brogue. Maybe it’s because decades of television and film make one follow up the young man’s confession of patricide with, “Yes, but what happens next?” And maybe it’s because what happens next takes longer than it should, because director Douglas Hughes deliberately slows the pace to let us drink in every last detail.

It’s too bad, because this play should come across as bitingly as ever. The villagers’ obsession with Christy (R. Hamilton Wright) foreshadows the way media darlings today become media devils almost overnight.

The publican’s lonely daughter, Pegeen (Barbara Dirickson), who falls in love with Christy, is an enduring portrait of a woman whose repressed frustrations cause her to see people as icons--instead of human beings.

Hughes’ fine cast gets the ambience right: Wright visibly undergoes an identity crisis as the impressionable Christy, Woody Eney is appropriately weak as Pegeen’s despised suitor and Marianne Owen calculating yet likable as the widow who tries to ensure that this situation works to her advantage.

But the production ultimately fails to spark electricity between the players, never capturing the elaborate dance Pegeen and Christy do in falling in love with each other’s illusions, then finally, too late and still not in sync, understanding who they really are.

There’s a hint of the power that might have been in the last 15 minutes, when Synge’s swift series of ironic reversals are delivered at a breathless pace, and the show at last suggests the quivering, tormented and tortured animal it always was in its heart. But the moment comes too little, too late.

At the Norris Theatre in Palos Verdes, tonight at 8, $35, (213) 544-0403; Pepperdine University’s Smothers Theatre, Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., $20, (213) 456-4522; Big Bear Lake Performing Arts Center Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m., $12.50, (714) 866-4970.