Road trip

Nola Rocco's blacktop daydream

by Bill Rodriguez

CASH, CARS AND THE COSMOS, Written and directed by Nola Rocco. At the Carriage House Theatre through August 9.

A play isn't a short-story acted out, or an essay with pacing bodies as well as talking heads. And if it tries to be, get set for 90 minutes or more of checking your watch. Plays can be playful, a process rather than just a container for conclusions. Sometimes words on stage can work better backing up music and movement, rather than the other way around. From parading Greek choruses to Robert Wilson's tableaus, many plays have shown that audio/visual aids were not invented by the Web or MTV.

A dancer and choreographer by training, Nola Rocco has learned well that sometimes an exasperated gesture speaks volumes. She demonstrates this many ways in her charming, funny Cash, Cars and the Cosmos, a theater piece she is staging at the Carriage House through August 9. The subtitle is "Driving impressions on the road to becoming." It's an extended daydream of being transported back to experiences in Italy, mostly, all while stuck in congested Los Angeles traffic. (Actually, "Santa Monica -- not LA," as she snaps in a whimsical aside that echoes the common Santa Monican lament.) We're helped by a peripatetic chorus, collectively named "The Figures of Speech," and two "Messengers" (Michael Cobb and Paula Sager), who give various anxieties and frustrations physical form. They mill, they gabble, they cavort, they trudge. Fellini-esque? You bet. Cobb strolls through, white jacket draped on shoulders, muttering Italian maledictions early on and later gives lengthy instructions on enthusiastically preparing olive oil, completely in Italian. Two reminders of how words themselves are incidental to emotional significance in memories.

There are some lucid and explicit set pieces amid the evocative reveries. Cobb portrays a fast-talking financial advisor trying to squeeze money out of Rocco, as she acts naïve. The best of these brief scenes is when Cobb is her auto mechanic, describing how her car got "stuck in go" (such a wonderful metaphor) and burned out the starter motor. Here is where Rocco's frustrated, hapless and pseudo-clueless acceptance of her lot resonates most loudly and entertainingly. Wordless scenes are more numerous. Some extend past their payoff, such as "The Yellow Road," where spilled coins and dancing with a gold-yellow trail of cloth elaborate the obvious. My favorite of these show-rather-than-tell bits was the visually hilarious "The Nightmare," which was no more than Rocco tossing and turning with the aid of her Cavorting Chorus, which flops her about like a worried rag doll.

You gotta be there. Words don't do the performance justice because the actual process and experience is the whole point. (Which is kind of a fractal fragment of the big picture of the piece as well as of the Big Picture, cosmos-wise, that the title suggests. Haven't you ever suspected that the same miserable little hassles that result in your parking tickets piling up form the same pattern, in microcosm, of how the planet at large has come up with toxic waste dumps?)

Cash, Cars and the Cosmos is one of those works that can suffer in the description. Yes, it begins with a five-minute recitation of a genesis poem, in the dark. But while the length isn't justified by the simple content, the duration serves to slow us down, sharpen our attention. Does the production need further trimming and shaping to improve pacing, so that entertaining or illuminating moments don't overstay their welcome? Yes. Could many of the scenes be clarified so that we know better what's going on, not to mention the point? Sure. Yet like the process of living itself, which CC&C tries to represent, this kind of stage work is not designed to be captured in theatrical amber. It's bound to be revised and improved. We need more ambitious ventures like this ad hoc production to keep the Providence theater scene exciting. Especially now, in the summer doldrums, Cash, Cars and the Cosmos certainly is helping to do that.