Lost and found

Harley's Rules of the road

by Johnette Rodriguez

Most of like to travel. But how many of us can recall where that wanderlust started? Trust Bill Harley, chronicler-extraordinaire of childhood events and the lessons learned from them, to remember. Get Lost is a new performance piece by Harley that builds upon his talents for writing and telling life's everyday stories to create a skillfully constructed and well-acted play, with a song or two tossed in for good measure.

Harley pins his first fascination with traveling on a neighbor's collection of National Geographic magazines, three grocery bags of which Mr. Schultz loans to the nine-year-old Bill. From the heights of Mt. Everest to the bug-munching Venus fly-trap, the boy is captivated, spreading the magazines all over the living room floor and wondering: "How could you contain the whole world in a suburban ranch house in Indianapolis?" Thus, before he takes us on a couple of his actual journeys into the world, Harley guides us through the landscape and characters of his childhood. He describes the biweekly garbage pick-ups in his neighborhood and the garbagemen with headbands and cigarette packs rolled into their T-shirt sleeves: "They were wild but polite, the pose I most wanted to strike in life."

Harley does a good imitation of the preschooler across the street, David Dingley, and he paints an affectionate portrait of his family's regular garbageman, Mr. Thompson, who would accept a glass of lemonade from Bill's mother now and again. These characters all come together in a boy's high drama, with many laughs of recognition in the audience over young Bill's fears and fumbles.

But Harley also turns philosophical at times, musing about the Australian aborigines' songlines: "Maybe it's only through traveling that we create the world." He and director Bob Jaffe have paced this extended monologue very carefully, slowing it down after a frenetic tale for a few moments of reflection and then gradually building up to another suspenseful episode.

Harley began his career as a singer-songwriter and in Get Lost, he modulates his voice as precisely as he would deliver a melody. He whines, he roars, he cracks wise, he brings it down to a hushed, throaty tone when he wants to make you listen the hardest to the conclusions he has arrived at. And though he has always given us memorable characters in his stories -- the bus driver, the janitor and his sixth-grade teacher in the `96 Lunchroom Tales come to mind -- they were drawn with a bit of distance and an overlay of reminiscence. In the second act of Get Lost, Harley shows us that he can inhabit a character on stage, complete with British accent, independent of the actual story he is relating. He dons a rain poncho, slings a pair of binoculars around his neck, clamps an old fishing hat on his head and becomes Birdie Bob, an offbeat guide on an off-the-beat island off the coast of Scotland, where Harley has gone to try and see Arctic terns. Harley's characterization of Bob deftly gets across the pathos and humanity behind the man's eccentric nature.

The final tour-de-force of Get Lost is an interweaving of two stories, one a traditional Scottish tale Harley learned from storyteller Duncan Williamson and the other a recounting of his own experience of watching seals along the coast of Scotland. This kind of going back and forth between two straight-line narratives is very tricky and can often be confusing or unsatisfying when monologuists attempt it. But with Harley we are in the extremely competent hands of a professional storyteller. He brings the skills he has so sharply honed to this piece and we are with him all the way, haunted by both stories.

Harley's overarching questions -- of why we travel, what value there is in getting lost and how we find out who we really are when we travel -- are not hammered at us, just gently proffered, like a polished pebble picked up while walking on the beach with a friend. "Here," he seems to be saying, "are some of my thoughts about this." But through all the laughter he engenders and the memories he evokes he gets you to thinking too.

Get Lost is at Perishable Theatre through November 14.

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