Quiet power The Canoe is a sturdy vehicle BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Like little boys tinkering with a chemistry set, dramatists long ago discovered the pleasures of combining interesting character elements to see what would fizz up or explode. Whether people are rattling around in an English court, a family living room or a barroom, a confined space means pressure is bound to build up. As Tom Wolfe liked to say, it can blow at any seam.

The Canoe, written and directed by Peter Wright, is playing at Roger Williams University’s Barn Summer Playhouse (through July 16) in a well-performed and very well-cast production. Closer to Friends with Norm and the gang than to The Iceman Cometh with Hickey wising up the Last Chance Saloon inmates, the play nevertheless creates a troubled little community whose problems are no joking matter.

We are at the Atlantic Bar, in some roughneck neighborhood of an Eastern city. The bartender and owner is Sal (Richard Wilber), a friendly guy but no patsy — he has the sense to keep a gun behind the bar. Over the course of a freezing December afternoon we are introduced to a half-dozen regular customers, and then meet them again a week later. The tone is good-natured rather than comical, although in inevitable bar tradition we do get a story or two that makes us laugh.

The realistic set gives us a sense of generic place: dart board, a row of beer taps, and a neon Budweiser welcome at the window, with grimy walls but a long bar that’s kept wiped clean. Artie (Rob Reimer), a mechanic, sets the scene as someone who doesn’t want his comfortable little life, which this friendly bar represents, disrupted. He can’t find his hat, a filthy yellow thing he wears like a security blanket. We know it will show up by the end as surely as a revolver placed on a mantelpiece by Chekhov in act one will be fired by final curtain.

Next, before we start worrying that Mary Poppins might float by, in storms Marge (Marissa Marion), demanding "a shot and a beer and no wiseass." She’s a worker at the shirt factory and pissed off that management isn’t taking their strike threat seriously. Marge is a doer, not a whiner, so she is also a union representative. In contrast is the sleazy Theo (Adam K. Roberts), a salesman for the factory who has no sympathy for the underpaid working stiffs on the line. Marge later describes him as a user who moves on to circles of friends until each sees him for who he is.

Theo, they all learn, is now seeing Marge’s sister Ceilia (Andrea Webber), a beautiful young woman with a history of being naïve about prospective boyfriends on their best behavior. But she has this bottle-clinking clan to look after her, such as Harry (George Billings), an amiable tough guy but a disaster magnet who attracts parking tickets like a magnet does iron filings. Foremost among Ceilia’s protectors is an older man, George (Gareth Eames), a wheelchair-bound architect who sips white wine with her and worries when she parks too far from the bar after dark.

It’s hard to tell at first whose play this is going to be. But that’s not a weakness — each character is well enough developed before the story takes a specific turn, so that the ensemble turns as one, so to speak, and we realize we’ve been looking at a sort of colony animal, a human sea anemone that responds collectively to danger. Of course it is Theo the shark who prompts their response. When Marge slaps him, he doesn’t hesitate to slap her back, aroused by blood in the water. Artie objects, Theo reverts to schoolyard bully, the bigger Harry glowers and intervenes, and so on.

Although violence describes the main arc of this play, the primary satisfactions are the give-and-take, our getting to know these people in little ways and hearing their stories. In this play about ordinary folks just getting by and trying to do the right thing, a series of anecdotes in which they tell each other what they’ve done that they felt bad about afterward is central. Without being sappy, this play is about the consequences of conscience or its absence.

The Canoe is a quiet little excursion that gets us more and more interested the deeper we travel into it. Director Peter Wright has assembled, without exception, age-appropriate actors that nail their characters convincingly — even the throwaway role of a dully arrogant cop that Steve Kilgore plays with understated hilarity. Good work all around.