Work in progress Custody battles itself BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Custody and Visitation Written and directed by Christopher Welch. With Jim Brown, Pat Toppa, Justin H. Brierley, Christina Petrone, Sophie Burnham, and Alycia Karlovich. At Firehouse Theater through September 28.

It’s a good thing that Firehouse Theater is premiering Custody and Visitation, by Christopher Welch. The play needs lots of work, but this is the first step in that process — putting it before an audience.

This two-act comedy makes a mistake that hobbles many early drafts of plays and novels by not ever deciding whose relationship it is going to be about. There are several possibilities, which makes this play an interesting case study.

One half of the relationship is Matt Langevin (Jim Brown), the father of the child in question. We learn right off that he has been brooding in Europe until recently. Matt is a television director and had been in Germany on a project, returning after an unsuccessful relationship in Paris with a married male actor he was working with in Cologne.

His seven-year-old daughter, Michele (Alycia Karlovich/Sophie Burnham), had been taken care of by her grandmother, Brooke (Pat Toppa), who tells him that the child doesn’t want to move in with him. (Making an assumption from the title of the play, at first I assumed that Brooke was his ex-wife, since he mentions that she doesn’t have joint custody.)

His living room, where all the action takes place, is as messy as a kid’s toy-strewn bedroom, only his clutter consists of boxes from having moved in a year before. The trauma that sent him away was the death of his lover Kit (Justin H. Brierley). One of the first things we learn in the opening moments is that his daughter hated Kit for having taken Matt away from her mother. Matt denies the hate part, pointing out that it was Kit who taught her how to juggle. But then Michele throws to the floor family snapshots that include pictures of his dead boyfriend and runs out of the room.

We eventually get to judge for ourselves, and not only in flashbacks. Kit pops up, a friendly ghost in the spirit of the Topper TV series of the 1950s, where a spectral couple hung around to continue interrupted cocktail party chatter. This is a diverting way to physicalize Matt’s not letting go of his memory, as the unseen Kit pats the couch for Brooke to sit next to him and has to hop aside as she starts to sit on him. But there is no compelling unresolved question for him to answer in Matt’s mind, so he seems here more for entertainment than edification.

When the spirit of Matt’s dead wife Holly (Christina Petrone) shows up next, there’s more potential, especially when he learns that she committed suicide. She has quite a bad-girl tale to tell, and one fraught with more than well-earned danger to herself. She dragged their daughter to Nevada casino life, complete with petty-criminal boyfriends. Here again an opportunity for the play is lost: instead of a mother’s nagging conscience over bad judgment, we get cold-hearted laughter over her last boyfriend getting shot to death.

So despite the title, this is not a story about Matt’s relationship with his daughter. It’s not about reconciling with his well-intentioned mother-in-law. It could be thought of as being about coping with the loss of his lover, but that focus fades in Act Two when the rival ghost shows up. The wife’s story is the most amusing, but it’s mere decoration by the time it arrives, the reconciliation with her mother coming across as a further digression. As far as this being about the central character’s understanding of himself, Matt’s last-scene conclusion that "I need Michele, I need someone to force me into being a grown-up" has a so-what quality, since it has little to do with their father-daughter relationship.

The playwright was worried enough that we wouldn’t follow the abrupt lighting-cued flashbacks that he not only included a note in the program, but also stepped out to remind us before the performance I caught. A far greater concern should have been that we not feel jerked from relationship to relationship before learning, and feeling, enough about each one to care. That mistake is what makes us laugh at shaggy dog stories, but this comedy isn’t supposed to be that kind of funny.

Christopher Welch is a lawyer living in Newport who has professional theater experience and two previously produced plays behind him. Custody and Visitation isn’t billed as a workshop production or a work in progress, and the playwright didn’t take the opportunity to have someone else direct. These are warning signs that this unfocused play may very well be carved in stone. That would be a shame.