May 13–20, 1999

theater

The Vanishing Kitchen

by Sam Adams

Sally's Gone, She Left Her Name

The People's Light & Theatre Company, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, PA, through June 6, 610-644-3500

"How come the longer you stay in this world, the more you see in this world, the harder and harder it gets to say what you mean?" So laments a character near the end of Sally's Gone, She Left Her Name, Russell Davis' expressionist drama of familial alienation and suppressed dreams, first produced in Baltimore 18 years ago and largely rewritten for this new production directed by Abigail Adams at People's Light. The setting is the well-appointed kitchen of a comfortable suburban home, which with its brushed steel and wood looks like something out of a home furnishings catalog; ideal for photographing but unfit for living.

Into those uncomfortable surroundings comes a family of four, mostly in pairs and never all at once. Henry (David Strathairn) is the patriarch, obsessed with material security as only the child of a bohemian can be. But the cracks have begun to appear in his family's perfect façade, both figuratively and literally. James F. Pyne's set literally splits apart, and as the play continues, pieces of the kitchen begin to vanish, until we're left with an expanse of blinding white like an unpainted canvas.

Faced with that rapidly disintegrating milieu, Henry's family retreats into different fantasies; his wife (Joyce Cohen) spins tales of wizards and long journeys, while his son (Mark Del Guzzo) half-seriously pretends he's a movie star, executing every gesture with a dash of hotshot panache. But Henry most sharply conflicts with his daughter, Sally (Elizabeth Webster), who's determined to follow her grandfather into the unstable world of art. For Henry, all his family's troubles are "just a phase," but his daughter's insistence and his wife's growing madness force the family into confrontations they may not be strong enough to resolve.

It's not hard to see why Davis would want to revisit Sally's Gone, whose themes are timely and whose language is rich. But despite (or perhaps because of) its reworking, the play feels lumpy, its concerns too nakedly exposed, its structure too stop-and-start. Ending nearly every scene with a monologue doesn't help move things along, and the disappearing kitchen, which seems like a great idea at first, becomes a predictable gimmick with each missing appliance: Will the dishwasher or the sink go next? Strathairn, best known for his movie work with John Sayles, delivers a rich and subtle performance, zeroing in on the heartbeat of each repetition and inverted phrase, and Cohen finds the brittle humor in her character's disintegrating pathos. All of which is too bad for Webster, who seems deliberate and somewhat mannered, if only by comparison. The 15-year-old Del Guzzo is charged with the play's most antic moments, and deliciously parodies a frenetic teen.