By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
Playwright and TV writer Craig Wright (“Lost,” “Six Feet Under”) almost gets the magic going in his play “The Pavilion,” first produced in 2000 and still popular in America’s regional theaters.
Beowulf Alley Theatre gives its production a good tumble with its three-member cast of Lisa Mae Roether, Michael “Miko” Gifford and Martie van der Voort.
The set-up has Peter (Gifford) a financially successful psychologist meeting up again with less successful Kari (Roether) at their 20-year high school reunion. Once they were the cutest couple in their senior class.
Then Kari became pregnant. Peter dumped her and went off to college. Kari ended her pregnancy, married a local golf pro and has been living her own life of quiet desperation.
Meanwhile the torch for Kari has been smoldering in Peter’s heart, while guilt eats away at his moral fiber in defiance of his professional distance from real life. Peter also writes folk songs, so…there you go.
Wright the playwright, and onetime Minneapolis ministerial student, is not concerned with whether or not Peter and Kari get back together. The dilemma of that mismatched couple is just the excuse for all of us to consider our place in the universe.
After all, whether you believe in parallel worlds or not, each of us already lives at the center our own personal universe.
Ever wonder what happened to the one who broke your heart and got away? Of course you have. Who hasn’t?
In your own personal universe, you get to decide what happened. Are these imagined events any less real than our memories? Are the kisses in your dreams any less substantial than the remembered kisses in your past?
In “Pavilion” the actor most responsible for stirring these philosophical thoughts is Martie van der Voort in the role of Narrator. But she also plays about 30 other characters, many of them flashing faces in the crowd at this reunion.
Many familiar to all of us. There’s the quiet girl who always seemed to be watching you from the sidelines; the busybody continually groping for intimate details of other people’s lives. That sort of thing.
As director, Whitney Morton has chosen to deliberately treat all these characters van der Voort plays as a blur of passing ships. The way you’d remember them through a hangover the morning after your 20th anniversary reunion dinner and dance
Without using any props or costume changes, and minimal body language, van der Voort says the lines of each passing personality. Some are only a few words, such as a gasping acknowledgement of some other unseen class member’s story.
Others are a little more developed, but we in the audience are left to sort them out on our own – while also pondering the what-might-have-beens in the unsatisfied longing of Peter and Kari.
Yes, there is life after high school. Quite a bit of it for most folks. But are there any second chances, as Peter asks Kari?
Of course there aren’t, really. We are all prisoners of our past. Even when we break free, it is the past that determines which direction we’ll run to reach freedom.
So we watch through the second act as Roether and Gifford warm to their task, creating a poignant chemistry between Kari and Peter.
Their acting is terrific, underlining the unkindest truth: if you don’t believe in the future, there’s no place to even have a second chance.
“The Pavilion” continues through March 3 with performances at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays, at Beowulf Alley Theatre, 11 S. Sixth Ave.
Tickets are $20, $18 for seniors, military and teachers, $8 for students. For details and reservations, 520-882-0555, www.beowulfalley.org
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