At death's door

Perishable's gripping One Flea Spare

by Bill Rodriguez

ONE FLEA SPARE. By Naomi Wallace. Directed by Rebecca Patterson. With Richard Noble, Paula J. Caplan, Elizabeth Ricardo, Michael A. Cappelli, and Joshua Allen. At Perishable Theatre through May 3.

There is nothing like dire straits to wonderfully concentrate the minds of a cast of characters. And few historical periods, besides our own, have provided as chilling a backdrop to drama as London of the mid-17th-century plague years. In One Flea Spare, playwright Naomi Wallace uses the heightened sensibilities of imminent death like a hallucinogenic drug, as four diverse shut-ins stare at their lives and one another through wide, shocked eyes.

Perishable Theatre has done well, both by getting rights to this newly appreciated play in the first place, and then in staging it with such satisfying finesse, thanks to director Rebecca Patterson. This is a production that neglects few of the theatrical opportunities of this lyrical, ruminative drama.

The year is 1665. The weekly death tolls are shouted in the streets like tabloid headlines, and most of the well -- and well-to-do -- have fled the pestilence that will kill one out of five. Nearly at the end of their 28-day isolation are the wealthy William Snelgrave (Richard Noble) and his wife Darcy (Paula J. Caplan), living mainly in a single room nearly bare of furniture, its bare plank floor scrubbed daily with vinegar. Into their confinement scurry two young intruders, so the quarantine period must go back to day one.

The 12-year-old girl, Morse (Elizabeth Ricardo), is the heart and soul of the play, both through framing the story with her narrative and shaping significances. She is the only one of the four who is not confused by dark events or resisting them. Morse is also the font of most of Wallace's gorgeous, casual poetry, as the child describes a plague summer so hot that "vegetables steamed in their crates" and where dogs licked the sweat off their faces. She's also spunky, whether from being the daughter of wealthy parents, as she declares, or a clever impostor. Ricardo is a wonder in the role, whether conveying girlish high spirits or soulfulness beyond Morse's pre-pubescent years. The play lives or dies upon the strength of this character, and this little Cranston schoolgirl can spin this microcosm around on her little finger.

No less imposing a presence is Mr. Snelgrave, whose elegant façade is propped up by money and his status as a port owner. To him, "When the rich die, it's hard to see why God took them." Most of the leavening humor of the play comes inadvertently through this arrogant fop, and Noble gives him a delightful obliviousness to his effects on the others. Even when Snelgrave gets cruel, toward the end, there's a purity to his malevolence.

He is fascinated with the older intruder, the sailor Bunce (Michael A. Cappelli), who sneaked into the house to escape Royal Navy press gangs. Playwright Wallace cleverly has him recount most of his horrific life history in answering the curious Snelgrave rather than complaining about his lot. Their contrast couldn't be more extreme, and when Snelgrave playfully gives him a "history lesson" by literally having Bunce walk around in his shoes, the foreshadowing is perfect.

Mrs. Snelgrave is also fascinated by the young sailor, despite his reeking of tar. Darcy Snelgrave has been abandoned by her husband after she suffered horrible burns over most of her body. Eventually the erotic charge almost causes the air to ripple, but perhaps the most revealing love scene is done fully clothed, when she slips a gloved finger into a wound in his side that refuses to heal.

In a way, the most powerful character is incidental to their little closet drama. Kabe (Joshua Allen) has the job of guarding the boarded-up Snelgrave house, prepared to kill anybody who tries to escape. Allen gives the reptilian Kabe an irrepressible joie de vivre that'll make your head swim as he taunts his wealthy captives and revels in polymorphously perverse abandon. (He bribes Morse with a sugar candy for each kiss on the leg she proffers from the window and an apple for each toe-suck.) Kabe provides the most explicit voice to the playwright's theme of social injustice -- but his kind of anti-class revolutionary fervor comes with a joke, a sales pitch for an anti-pestilence elixir at six shillings per bottle.

One Flea Spare has gotten a lot of ink because its author has been neglected. Much has been made of that fact that the play's impressive 1995 debut was in London, where Kentucky playwright and poet Wallace had been better appreciated. The play received three prizes in the states in 1996, when it finally came to Actors Theater of Louisville. Only last year did it arrive Off-Broadway, at the Joseph Papp Public Theater.

The Perishable Spring production is a worthy staging, from the raised plank floor holding two solitary chairs in Monica Shinn's set design, to the character-enhancing costumes by Charlotte Dunning Burgess, to Tim Uhelan's riveting lighting design, to the flute compositions by Steve Dubois, and their evocative performance by Tiffany Blais.

One Flea Spare is not one to miss.