STAGE REVIEW
Long 'Rain' presents emotional flood

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic

•	'Rain' 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays, through June 2 Yellow Brick Studio $10; 591-7999

The lust! The hypocrisy!

The unrelenting melodrama! And — wait a minute — aren't those tooth marks where someone's been gnawing on the scenery?

It's The Actors' Group production of "Rain," written by John Colton and Clemence Randolph, based on a short story by Somerset Maugham. The story places in much too close proximity a sexually repressed clergyman and an overly emotional prostitute. Trapped by a monsoon in a ramshackle hotel in Pago Pago, the two have nowhere to go but on a roller coaster ride between spiritual salvation and sexual depravity.

Trapped by the confines of the minuscule Yellow Brick Studio Theater — where crossing one's legs creates a performance hazard and an actor's convulsive shudder creates a seismic effect — the audience has nowhere to focus but squarely down an actor's larynx.

What's missing here is some emotional distance.

But director David Starr will give us none of that, and the evening's three acts become a histrionic challenge match between Dan Furst as the Bible-thumping Rev. Davidson and Melinda Maltby as party girl Sadie Thompson. Lean back, because any fever she can pitch, he can pitch higher.

Maltby's emotions come in a variety pack: raucous, panicked, and hysterical. Furst more quietly refocuses his excessive ardor away from God and on to Sadie's dream-like "hills of Nebraska." We could enjoy this more if, somehow, we didn't feel that we were expected to take it seriously. However, like an old movie, the cast is unrelenting — no nods or winks — and we must swallow this medicine like the hapless miscreants we know ourselves to be.

Give credit where it is due. Dressed all in white, Furst makes us see his character in a black cloak and top hat. And underneath those bangle bracelets and pounds of eye shadow, Maltby shows us Sadie's throbbing heart of gold.

Needless to say, this makes for a long three acts, by the end of which we are demanding that somebody — or everybody — gets their overdue comeuppance. It comes without sympathy, just a plea for some evening air.

The rest of the cast fills in around the high emotion, picking up cues with arthritic pain and side-tracking into fumbling improvisation.

Richard McWilliams is the voice of normalcy as Dr. MacPhail, and Frankie Enos is a study in quiet missionary desperation as Mrs. Davidson.

This is the sort of performance that engages us on two levels. We process what's happening, but simultaneously restage it in our imagination. How could that line be delivered without gagging? Could that emotion be refocused to carry six feet instead of six blocks? What kind of wall hooks would keep the hats from falling to the floor?

But we become fatigued and eventually give up the effort. Maybe we'll try to find that old Joan Crawford movie version instead.