May 28, 2004

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Fun with radioactivity

by Ben Marks

There's a lovely little moment about halfway through the second act of "Pierre and Marie," through June 19 at the Bus Barn Theatre in Los Altos.

In it, Georgette (played to out-size perfection by Glenna DiGiacinto-Murrillo) -- a former waitress who has taken a job as a nanny for Pierre and Marie Curie's newborn infant -- complains loudly that no one ever bothers to ask her opinion when it comes to questions of science. Rising to the challenge presented by this voluble member of the uneducated masses, Marie (Mary McGloin) delivers a concise and informative explication of the differences between physics and chemistry, pausing only to bemoan her lack of vinegar so she could have demonstrated an actual chemical reaction for poor, simple Georgette. Without skipping a beat, Georgette casually announces that she carries a bottle of vinegar with her wherever she goes (imagine that!), whereupon she retrieves it from her bag and hands it to Marie, who barely blinks before proceeding with her demonstration.

And there, alas, ends the lovely, funny, little moment -- one of only a few in the entire play. DiGiacinto-Murrillo's Georgette clearly gets the silliness that should be at the heart of this alleged comedy, but McGloin's Marie does not. She isn't the least bit taken aback that her nanny is apparently wheeling her child around Paris with a bottle of vinegar on her person. Indeed, she forges ahead with such humorlessness and dispatch that we in the audience find ourselves wondering if perhaps there was something about 1880's Paris that made carrying a bottle of vinegar advisable. We should be laughing but instead we are merely confused.

Humorlessness and dispatch, in fact, are two of this play's biggest problems (besides the often corny, melodramatic writing and the wisdom of crafting a comedy about the discovery of radiation in the first place, but there's nothing we can do about that). Too typically, the actors move hurriedly and joylessly through their scenes, trudging from beat to beat to beat.

The problems begin in the play's first scene when we meet Pierre, who is played earnestly but ultimately not convincingly by Matthew Travisano. As the lights go up, Pierre enters his freezing-cold Sorbonne laboratory. What follows is supposed to be a tone-setting bit of shtick as the young professor struggles to stay warm. But instead of using his movements to tell us about his character as a Bill Irwin or Charlie Chaplin might have done (sure the comparison is unfair, but the scene demands no less), Travisano appears to have his hands full remembering his stage directions and blocking.

Which brings us to another of the production's many problems: the set, which doesn't work, literally. The coat rack, in particular, seemed an especially useless prop on the night that I attended the play (hats and coats kept falling to the floor, requiring actors to frequently break their stride to tidy up after each other).

And the two tables where Pierre and his lab mate, Bemont (played big, loud and with over-the-top abandon by Luis A. Nunez), sit to correct their students' papers are so crowded with props that they offer barely enough room for either man to complete even simple tasks. This sense of claustrophobia is probably deliberate so that the insertion of Marie into these crowded quarters will make things feel all the more crowded upon her arrival. Fair enough, but actors must be given enough room to do their jobs -- to convince us that they are not actors. Individually the props are all perfectly acceptable, but as a group their large number give the actors needless competition.

Even worse than the quantity of props is their duration on stage. Amazingly, the same rat's nest of bottles and jars and various scientific apparatus remain on the Curie's twin laboratory tables throughout the entire play. We know from the program and the unfurling of events before our eyes that the actions of the play are supposed to span four years, but it would have been helpful to give the audience a few visual cues by removing props in the second act to help this illusion along.

The most egregious example of this inattention to detail is in the first act, when a pot of goulash that Marie is heating up on the lab's stove remains there for several scenes, which in "Pierre and Marie" time equals at least several weeks -- if not months. In the Curie's lab, radiation poisoning is apparently not the only peril.

Set woes aside, it is the interpretation of the play that I think ultimately dooms this production. Director Linda Piccone doesn't seem to understand that she has a comedy on her hands. Nunez and DiGiacinto-Murrillo understand it very well, which is why their performances bring the play to life whenever they were on stage. But Travisano's Pierre is stiff and decidedly not funny (not a good thing for the lead actor in a comedy). McGloin's Marie, who enters the play a vaguely kinky revolutionary (think Squeaky Fromme with a Polish accent), de-evolves into a career-obsessed bore. Even the couple's antics as they try to hide a stack of pornography and a small cache of dynamite from their blustery, status-obsessed patron, Chevrier (John Baldwin), lack spark. I'm sorry, but Marie Curie as 19th-century porn-queen terrorist should be funny. Instead, Marie covers her actions so well from Chevrier that she almost succeeds in hiding the evidence of her extracurricular life from the audience.

Dull is one thing, but if you want to win an audience's heart, it's a good idea to occasionally let them in on your character's secrets.
What Bus Barn Stage Company presents "Pierre and Marie"
Where Bus Barn Theatre, 97 Hillview Avenue, Los Altos
Through June19. Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. (May 28 is sold out); Sunday June 6 and 13 at 3 p.m.
COST $25; $20 for Sunday matinees
INFORMATION Call (650) 941-0551 or visit www.busbarn.org

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