And now... The latest from David Eliet BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	And Then . . . Written and directed by David Eliet. With Bob Jaffe and Laura Hitt. At the Carriage House through March 20.

A founding director of both Trinity Conservatory and Perishable Theatre, David Eliet is back in town and back at work. Two one-acts that he has written and directed are being staged at the Carriage House through March 20, and they are likely to get Providence audiences looking for more.

Collectively titled And Then . . ., because they each begin with those words, Day After Day After Day and Shadows 1959 are more about how events are perceived than about the occurrences recollected in them. In the tradition of Harold Pinter, conversation can conceal rather than reveal intentions. There’s also a lot of Beckett-esque repetition in both plays, which builds up like layers of color on a palette and serves to help us follow the intended contours of what is depicted.

In Shadows 1959, that is an entire adult life, so an outline is all we can expect. This is a soliloquy by Jan Fliml (Bob Jaffe), whose traumatic times in war-ravaged Slovakia the program details with more information. The play intends to convey his emotional life, however, and does so exquisitely, lyrically. The short work isn’t out to describe the horrific events of wartime, but rather their consequences upon the human spirit. For example, Jan doesn’t play a violin he is given in exchange for some kindness and food, because he knows that whatever he might play he would not be able to hear through, as he puts it, the memories of his own screams ("The darkness is too thick: it muffles all the sound").

With music there is always light, he declares, and the motif of light and darkness recurs throughout the play, accumulating to resonant effect. On stage is a table piled with books and holding a chess board and a bottle of wine, which the reminiscing Fliml sips as he speaks and the Prompter (David Eliet) cues reluctant memories or recites along with him, just as we all repeat our compulsive scripts about the past.

He speaks of Czechoslovakia, "where all the colors are gray" — a perfect description of both the bleached-out memories of traumas and the black-and-white photographs from his past. Playwright Eliet doesn’t burden us with more details than necessary: of Fliml’s two years imprisoned, we mainly get the image of him and other men wearing a circular groove in the concrete. Of his adored wife Magda, we get mainly her ultimate significance: their daughter. He says he had to come back — from prison, from his dark thoughts — in a fated sense, because "if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here."

Jaffe is most effective, and poignantly so, when he is most restrained as Fliml. In the opening play, Day After Day After Day, he conveys the emotions of an unnamed man broadly, grimacing to the point of caricature, diminishing the character’s impact on us. Director Eliet apparently wanted him to contrast with the carefree insouciance of the woman with whom he is conversing. Laura Hitt presents her vibrantly as she sits sipping tea in an ornate parlor setting, with all the presumed immunity from travails that wealth can bring.

The play’s payoff consists of our gradually coming to understand their relationship as well as the time they are speaking about. The oriental rug is covered with notes that he has been taking. She tells of when she was 15, living in that house while her parents traveled abroad in warm climes, the servants her only companions. Old William, wheezing in the hallway, peeking through the keyhole as she bathed. The handyman Harold, chirping "top o’ the mornin’, Miss," each day as he fiddles with the rain gutter and she slides out of bed in the altogether. And "dear sweet Tessy, with her round Irish face and white, white skin," as she repeatedly describes her.

Is the man helping her write her memoir? Or is she recounting this for him, helping him come to terms with some recollected event she is unfolding? Eventually, the scribbling man comes into the picture she is describing, a violent incident is described, and we get at least a general sense of why they are obsessing about the past.

And Then . . . certainly makes for a satisfying and thought-provoking evening, but these two finger exercises make clear that Eliet is capable of much more. Theatergoers around here in the late 1980s might recall his fairy tale musical East of the Sun and West of the Moon or his powerful drama And Salome Danced at 2nd Story Theatre. Let’s hope that we get such ambitious projects from the playwright during his current time in Providence.