Inner strength

Watch's triumph of the will

by Bill Rodriguez

SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME. With directorial assistance by Fred Sullivan Jr. With Nigel Gore, Tony Estrella and Christopher Byrnes. At Alias Stage through December 20.

by Bill Rodriguez

Frank McGuinness's Someone Who'll Watch Over Me shouldn't work as a play. To its credit, it's both earnest and frequently funny, poignant yet restrained with its tearjerking. But the main danger it risks lies with its set-up: three men locked in a sunless Beirut cell, hostages for some unspecified Muslim demands. Unless you're a playwright genius like Samuel Beckett, whose sole character in one play has her head sticking out of sand, you immobilize your actors at your -- and your audience's -- peril.

Yet three Alias Stage veterans pull it off quite well. The excruciating boredom of confinement -- chained next to their bedding, no less -- isn't conveyed by boring us; their many months in captivity don't seem to be happening in real time. Actors Nigel Gore, Tony Estrella and Christopher Byrnes are a good mix, spanning a physical and psychological range that assemble into a collective Everyman. They are helped nicely by Darleen Viloria's mood-enhancing lighting design and the uncredited stark gray set -- a bare bulb and cinder block.

The first hostages we see are Adam (Estrella), the American, and Edward (Byrnes), the Irishman. Adam has been a doctor in Lebanon (perhaps medical, perhaps Ph.D), studying the effects of the lengthy civil war on children. His way of coping with his four months of incarceration has been to keep himself physically fit, doing push-ups and running in place despite his chained ankle. In the opening scene, his cool is being challenged by Edward, who at first appears to be just mean, trying to get Adam to crack. Edward is a cynical Dublin journalist who has seen it all before, but we eventually see that more than a mean spirit has been at play for his two months there. Edward wants them both to be as tough on each other as possible, to strengthen them for their ordeal.

That kind of interplay is the best that Someone offers. We form some initial conclusion about one of the characters, and only later grow into an accurate understanding. That happens best with the third man who is soon thrown in with them. Michael (Gore) is a proper English academic, bordering on sniveling hysteria when he first awakes there. He had been grabbed in a market, where he was about to buy some fruit that he had forgotten to get. His pear flan was going to be a high point of a dinner he was preparing for some faculty members. But by the end of the two acts, we can no longer dismiss him as weak and effeminate. Along the way, the stiff-upper-lip tradition earns some respect as the flip side of icy British reserve ("I really think that we're giving in to them if we descend to vulgarity").

All three actors sustain and develop these characters throughout, and of course each gets his Obligatory Moving Soliloquy. One is when the Brit describes how his father stifled the pain he endured in WWII, weaving that in with a discussion of Middle English culture and his wife's death in a car accident. Byrnes, as the Irishman, gets most of the emotional mini-monologues and wisecracks; and as Edward's character gets rounded out, we hear declarations -- "They follow their orders. I do what I choose" -- that are earned rather than merely recited.

Estrella gets his chance to show his stuff in a mid-point scene. His American is frightened beyond words by an incident that renders him sleepless and borderline psychotic with terror. Adam, in one breathtakingly on-target fantasy, imagines laying the body of an Arab he kills on the doorstep of his family, so that he would have deserved the torment he has been put through.

Woven through the play are such reminders of the power of imagination -- and humor. They "write" letters aloud. They entertain one another by projecting movies they describe. They lift their spirits with the right stirring song at the right moment. Imagination becomes the salvation of each, even those who are not the one who is eventually released.

Part of the risk taken here is that this all could have come across as less a full-fledged play than as a workshop effort to stretch the talents of the actors. Which it was. The actors did most of the shaping of their roles and the interplay among them, with mere "directorial assistance" by Trinity Rep"s Fred Sullivan. As it turned out, that's all well and good. There is little self-indulgence in evidence here. What with mad scenes and several murderous tirades, opportunities to gnaw the concrete scenery abounded. That very tension, between opportunity for excess and stifled expression, also makes for a riveting, if over-extended, theater experience.