Players stage pair of gloomy one-acts

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Special to The Advertiser

•	'Ashes to Ashes' and 'Far Away' Ernst Lab Theatre, University of Hawai'i-Manoa 8 p.m. today and tomorrow, 2 p.m. Sunday $10, $8, $3 956-7655

Something horrible has happened, is happening or may happen. And we are helpless to avoid participating in it.

The evening leads off with Caryl Churchill's "Far Away," a parable that begins quite conventionally. A girl (Teiliana Pelakai) comes down to her Aunt's parlor at 2 a.m., unable to sleep. She has heard screams. It must be an owl, says the Aunt (Hilary Hadley Wright), an owl's shriek sounds like a person screaming.

But the child persists and the Aunt changes her story. It was the Uncle helping some people escape. But the Uncle was beating one of the people. He must have been a traitor.

The second scene shows the girl, now grown up (Miriam Newman) , making elaborate hats in a factory. The hats are worn by beaten prisoners, who put on a grisly fashion show before being led away to an uncertain fate.

The last scene brings the girl and her hat-making partner (John Michael Striffler) back to the Aunt's country home. Events are no longer far away. The world has gone mad and all life forms are choosing up sides in a bizarre and nightmarish prelude to the apocalypse.

Cut to curtain and a short intermission.

Harold Pinter's "Ashes to Ashes" follows, but instead of mopping up the loose ends left by the Churchill play, it adds to them.

Director Sammie Choy brings the second play physically much closer to the audience, staging it on a small raised area directly in front of the first row.

Two characters in stylish clothes are in deep conversation — Rebecca (Gwen Montgomery) and Devlin (D. Omar Williams) — strike a vaguely Noel Coward pose. He drinks straight whiskey in a crystal glass, she stares off into the middle distance. Are they lovers or is he her therapist?

She has been abused by a former lover and, in a sensual memory of erotic fear, recounts in clear detail how he made her kiss his closed fist and the way his hands on her throat were provocatively gentle.

But Rebecca and Devlin seem incapable of any forward movement, and the conversation remains dully circular until Rebecca describes a memory of having her baby taken from her as she boarded a train for a prison camp.

It seems impossible that she is a Holocaust survivor, but she is quite literally possessed of a universal horror that becomes her personal burden.

It ends with a curious twist that raises more questions about the pair's tortured relationship, leaving us wishing that director Choy might have given us at least some visual resolution instead of another tantalizing clue as the lights go out.

This twin bill proves drama can be simultaneously enigmatic, disturbing, and political. But while we're wishing, we might add that we'd like to have cared more about the characters in "Far Away" and seen more deeply into the couple in "Ashes to Ashes."