Time passages Reeling in the Years with Lorca BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Spain’s Federico Garcia Lorca, executed at the beginning of his country’s civil war, called his As Five Years Pass "a mystery play about time." But there’s no mystery about how Brown University Theatre/Sock and Buskin has gotten two hours of what could be staged as overwrought brow-furrowing to pass interestingly for us: through humor, when appropriate, and with inventive imagination throughout.

Lorca has been known more widely and influentially as a poet, but as an equally prolific playwright he wanted this play to represent "the theater of tomorrow." (It has also been called "impossible theatre.") Not about to forgo the intensity that focused language can create, it is poetical. With Lorca as aware as his modernist contemporaries that surface appearances deceive, the action is secondary to the play’s undercurrents.

It begins and ends in the library of a Young Man (Mahdi Salehi), emphasizing that all that has passed could be a dream or a deathbed reflection. For some unspecified reason, he is going to wait five years before marrying his 15-year-old fiancŽ (Elizabeth Forsyth). When the time comes and they meet after she has been abroad, she is cavorting with a coarse Football Player (Dov Lebowitz-Nowak) and spurns the Young Man. He wanders off distraught, derided and tormented by the likes of a harlequin and a clown from a circus whose festivity seems to celebrate his pain.

In this production, we certainly are prepared for what to expect. Beforehand, as we take our seats the Young Man is already on stage, dangling from the ceiling looking about curiously and moving as if submerged. An Old Man (Graham S. Norwood) who will instruct him sits reading, half his face beardless and young. Before the play proper begins, a barefoot Fellini parade wanders out, the odd characters we soon will meet. One is nearly naked, squirming like some sideshow freak. One is divided like the Old Man, half long-haired woman and half formally dressed man.

The set, designed by Michael McGarty, has a blackboard background, dominated by two weeping quarter-moons, on which characters chalk fragments of Lorca’s love poems. Several costumes in Phillip Contic’s design contain text, further reminders that we are being offered language rather than flesh and blood. But his most remarkable costumes are for a couple of imaginatively menacing second-act trees in a hostile forest.

The satisfactions here are mostly in individual moments and performances, many of which are entrancingly enhanced by Michelle Bach-Coulibaly’s choreography. Zack Fuller is remarkable as a cat, naked except for a loincloth, sinuously writhing outside a walkway above the audience as he speaks to a boy who holds him by a long cloth leash, then drops into an aisle. That boy is nearly as transfixing, with the balance of innocence and knowingness that Ariela Ronay-Jinich provides.

Other performers who impressed me with their presences and interpretations included Georgia Cohen as a flighty Italian diva, Kira Neel as a vivacious clown, and Adriana Lopez as, well, a fire-eyed flamenco-dancing typist. This is one of the first plays Lorca wrote after a trip to New York, where he finally owned up to his homosexuality. That subtext surfaces now and then, such as with a self-impressed friend of the Young Man, whom Adam Shulman portrays with confidence and nuance.

Under John Emigh’s co-direction, much of the poet-playwright’s inflated language is offset by humor, to minimize the preciousness of the bare emotionality. This is appropriate to the story as well as to our less sentimental age, since the Young Man, played with restrained focus by Salehi, is the only one who consistently takes his situation seriously

The production certainly is in appropriate directorial hands. Theater professor Emigh was so taken with Lorca’s plays as an undergraduate that he learned the language, went to Spain, and translated some of the writer’s neglected plays, he explains in his program notes.

The translation is by Caridad Svich, who is scholar-in-residence at Perishable Theatre this season. The music design, composed by Tom Farrell, works well. Dance and movement is so integral in the Brown production that it’s difficult to imagine this play succeeding as well without it. That observation has been made before — a pared-down ballet adaptation was done by Merce Cunningham in 1943. Bach-Coulibaly’s contribution is so integral that she is credited as co-director rather than choreographer. How fitting that she was tapped: the first major dance she choreographed, we are informed, was to Lorca’s poetry.

Lovers of theater have a lot to thank Brown Theatre for. Not only are occasional seminal but obscure plays produced, which no other local theater with sane fiscal management can often do, but they usually are staged with such skill that would make the playwright proud. Lorca, among others, would approve.