Also this issue:

Tilted View
One Philadelphian's quest to bring a controversial piece of public art to our city.
-Robin Rice

Odd Fellows
-Jen Darr

BodyVox
-Janet Anderson

Louis Menand
-Sam Adams

tick tick ... Boom!
-Steve Cohen

Carmina Burana/Le Travail
-Janet Anderson

By the Bog of Cats ...
-Toby Zinman

The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron?
-David Anthony Fox and Toby Zinman

February 20-26, 2003

theater

Northeast Local

by David Anthony Fox

Written in 1995, Northeast Local -- by Philadelphia writer Tom Donaghy and featuring a Philadelphia setting -- only now arrives at the Arden for its hometown premiere. It's the sort of event that asks for a modifier like "belated."

In reality, the surprise is that anybody's bothering to stage it at all. Northeast Local, despite the implied promise of the title, could not be more generic. It's a dreary, by-the-numbers marriage play in which no cliché is left unmined.

Local heroes Mickey and Gi (short for "Gina Maria Allegra") are a couple whom we follow, beginning in 1963, through three decades of ups and downs. Mickey is a steelworker from a pious Irish Catholic family. He falls prey to the predictable troubles: drink, and unemployment in a declining industry. Gi is an Italian-American who considers Jackie Kennedy a role model. She's a working homemaker who paints on the side, and who strives for an amorphous sense of self-fulfillment that's always just out of reach.

Northeast's episodic structure has us revisit the couple at regular intervals every few years. It's a sign of the play's triteness that the initial scenes are hung on patently obvious Memorable Moments. Mickey and Gi sleep together for the first time. Gi meets her mother-in-law. The couple brings home their baby and on it goes.

Augmenting what feels like a two-hander is a pair of supporting characters: Mickey's mother, Mair, the Irish dowager from hell, and Gi and Mickey's friend and neighbor, Jesse, a sensitive black man who bakes.

Ah, I forgot to mention the off-stage principal character: Mickey and Gi's son, Stefan. Though we never meet him, we learn several queer factoids about Stefan. For Halloween, he dressed up as Harriet Tubman. For his 10th birthday, he wanted a "Talkie Tina" doll. And during an especially ghastly family Thanksgiving dinner, Stefan determinedly remained upstairs, listening to A Chorus Line's "I Hope I Get It."

Believe me -- we get it, we get it. But Donaghy, apparently not trusting the audience to pick up the full import of his paper-thin play, can't resist loading the dialogue with thudding metaphors. Says Mickey (after inadvertently putting his hand through a shoji screen): "That's what you get when you lean on something you think is solid." And worse, Mickey again (looking into the empty travel bag his mother clutched till her dying day): "Imagine holding onto something with nothing inside."

As Mickey, poor William Zielinski is required to speak these lines, which may be why the usually excellent actor gives a weird, disengaged performance. Similarly, Catharine Slusar (Gi), who has charmed me elsewhere, here is clenched and grim. Both work too hard to suggest youthful energy in the early scenes, and neither quite evokes the requisite sense of blue-collarness. Dale Soules (Mair) and Raphael Peacock (Jesse) do what they can with their underwritten roles -- it isn't much, but it's not their fault.

As if designed to complement Northeast Local's paucity of ideas, director Terrence J. Nolen provides an equally meager production, lifeless in all details including a pillow-and-blanket bundle that's the fakest baby I've seen on any stage, but which nonetheless is every bit as vivacious as the surroundings.

Through March 23, Arden Theatre Company, 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122