THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501070054
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Theater review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, THEATER CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
SPARKED BY a superb performance by David McCann as a deceptively simple fisherman in conflict with his heritage, ``Sea Marks'' is a major step in a Virginia Stage Company season that is obviously designed to return the theater to the people - the real people.
Here is a play that is unabashedly romantic but at the same time soars to heights of poetic grandeur.
For those of us who live near the sea, it speaks of place and mood. To everyone, it is a play about isolation and communication.
Colm Primrose, as portrayed with warmth and vulnerability by McCann, is a man with holes in his socks, a working man who is proud of it. His home is a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, a place where there are no last names and no electricity. Raised by a man he calls The MacAfee, Primrose has never courted or married a girl. Then Primrose meets a city woman and begins writing to her.
His letters, we are told more often than we're shown, are poetic. She is smitten. She returns to the island to visit, and persuades him to visit her in the city. Love blooms.
It is all terribly simple, but refreshingly so. This is by no means a great play but it is a particularly likable one, perhaps because of its very lack of arty ambition. The plot is predictable, yet we are cajoled and comforted by the lovers' joyful discovery of each other.
Playwright Gardner McKay, regrettably, didn't turn out a body of work to match this effort. This is the same Gardner McKay who played Adam Troy, skipper of the schooner Tiki in the ABC series ``Adventures in Paradise,'' back in the early '60s.
Life magazine once hailed him as ``the new Gregory Peck.'' He never really made it as that kind of star, but this play makes us wish he had written more.
Initially, we might well approach ``Sea Marks'' with the suspicion that VSC, on another one of its economy moves, might have chosen it because it is a two-character drama that requires only a sparse set.
Happily, this production is worth the effort. In a season that thus far has included a well-acted but unfocused premiere such as ``Dirt'' and a rather uninspired ``Peter Pan,'' ``Sea Marks'' evolves as the gem we've been waiting for.
Greta Lambert brings the required double edge to the character of city woman Timothea Stiles - a woman the audience, rightfully or wrongfully, suspects. After all, she is the woman who may destroy Colm's charming innocence. As he puts it, in a moment of his own suspicion, ``I think she's a woman to cut the toes off a man.''
Lambert effectively proves to us that the character is no snob, but her persona, once the play shifts to Liverpool, is a bit uneven. She reverts, for moments at a time, to her Welsh-farm background. He suggests that ``you'll always be from Wales'' while she counters that it wouldn't do, because she has ``a need to rise.'' She reveals his writings to a waiting public as he protests that he seeks no part of this fame.
The inconsistencies in her character are inherent in the script, and Lambert handles them with an aggressive attack.
The refreshing thing here is McCann's quite awesome ability to suggest simplicity. As etched by McCann, Colm is a close cousin to this year's national phenomenon of honesty and naivete, Forrest Gump, with an ample dose of the artistic conflicts of Thomas Wolfe thrown in.
Wolfe, who came from a similarly rustic background, claimed that ``you can't go home again'' but Colm says, simply, that he has been ``too long from the water.''
The two characters are asked to fill what seems like a huge stage. Scenic designer Mark Sommerfield might have suggested more intimacy by using less space, but his surrealistic suggestion of sea cottage and city flat is nonetheless intriguing.
Director Charlie Hensley, in his best work at VSC, has kept these two characters balanced. It is especially refreshing that Colm's accent is restrained and quite comfortably natural. One can only imagine the blarney that this script might produce under less restrained conditions.
``Sea Marks'' cries out for a recognition of a simpler time and place - a place free of ambition and the restraints required by the ``outside'' world.
Although Valentine's Day is still a month off, it is a reminder that communication between two people is as lovely as it is rare. This is Virginia Stage Company's best outing in quite a while. by CNB