Sound vision Perishable’s delightful Kid-Simple BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Kid-Simple: a radio play in the flesh By Jordan Harrison. Directed by Mark J. Lerman. With Laurabeth Greenwald, Dan Goldrick, David Hanbury, Richard Noble, Casey Seymour Kim, Wendy Overly, and Mark Carter. At Perishable Theatre through May 29.

Kid-Simple: a radio play in the flesh has popped up for us at Perishable Theatre like a Jack-in-the-box that takes 90 minutes to settle down. I mean that in the best sense. A play energized by this much sense of play is quite a treat.

Playwright Jordan Harrison has taken an impossible notion and made an adventure out of it. What if we could hear the unhearable? Where might that lead us?

High school student Moll (Laurabeth Greenwald) likes to invent things. Her latest science fair winner is a doozy, a machine she calls the Third Ear. It can be tuned to let you hear the impossibly faint — toenails growing on a field mouse, dust bunnies scampering. Or simply the impossible — a heart breaking, the cacophony of what a schoolroom chalkboard has heard over the years.

Of course, the mystique of the Golden Age of Radio is brought in as well. Richard Noble and Casey Seymour Kim play Moll’s parents, listening to the weekly Radio Mystery Nostalgia Hour with her. They also are the hokey mystery plot’s two main characters. As the hard-bitten, vaguely sinister Mr. Wachtel, Noble nails the honeyed malevolence of such radio voices. As his passive female counterpart, Miss Kendrick, Kim goes for a sultry timbre and damsel-in-distress vulnerability that would have rendered Bogart a goner in a finger-snap. (Kim’s Amway saleslady in another scene is a stitch, merging amiability and exasperation into tightly wrapped hilarity.)

This confection of a play offers us a bowlful of such set-piece morsels. David Hanbury plays a master of disguises, and his goatish Pan, seducing the virginal Oliver (Dan Goldrick) on Moll’s eventual heroic quest, gets funnier as it gets more nonchalant. The Dark Dwellers who sent him are after Moll’s marvelous device to transcend such mundane states as ordinary hearing. All but disembodied, Noble and Kim are at their comical cleverest, creating these sniveling villains purely through voice.

Wendy Overly skillfully ranges from mellifluous to murderous as the Narrator, although the play loses track of her for long stretches. Mercifully, super-titles are projected as additional aid to help us identify such stage directions as "Sound of an empty park swing in the wind," "Sound of creative din," and "Sound of unpromising mechanical whirr." Under eye shade and furrowed brow, Mark Carter labors mightily to give birth to all these thunks, gleeps, and splashes.

Director Mark J. Lerman has done much to bring the imaginary into the tangible world. The narrator and sound-effects man work visibly in a raised area behind the performance area, and Christina Lowe, the actual stage manager of the production, works in the open. At one point she even upstages the busy actors as she sets up a ladder to change the overhead slide carousel for the super-titles.

This is one of those animated plays that doesn’t promise much in the way of a story line, so we can’t complain much about being shortchanged in that regard. Instead, it tries for what may very well be more difficult: keeping so many balls in the air that we’re not only impressed by the feat but amazed that so few are dropped.

As Moll, Greenwald holds this play together through sheer pluck and dazzle. Looking like an impish 14-year-old, which helps the undercurrent of naïve innocence, the Brown sophomore theater major pulls off a comic tour de farce alongside some heavy competition. I certainly hope we see more of her in the next few years.

Kid-Simple peters out at the end, despite pointers toward mythic satisfactions (a half-hearted Quest) dangled before us on the way to the resolution. This play is packed with marvelous inventiveness equal to Moll’s physical inventions. Some could power whole new plays, such as one unintended eventual consequence of the Third Ear: sounds and noises occasionally replace spoken words, such as a ricocheting bullet standing in for "love."

Some of the delight of this hour and a half in the mind of Moll and her creator has to do with how the play coaxes us to go with the entertaining flow. The pat pleasures of linear narrative are not being cultivated much in the garden of theatrical delights that is Paula Vogel’s MFA playwriting program at Brown, which Harrison completed last year. Playwrights there get permission — to share the process of imaginative unfolding — not kitchen sinks.

Kid-Simple was part of last year’s TextPlosion Staged Reading Series at Perishable. It went on to become part of the prestigious annual Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s good to see Brown playwrights and off-Trinity theater continuing to contribute so well to the national theater scene.