By the sea Off-Season and Van Gogh in Gloucester BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Off-Season: A Duet Chatter, Yatter, Flotsam & Dross or Ted & Tom & Terry & Terri, by Terrence McNally. Sins of the Mother, by Israel Horovitz. Directed by Thomas Caruso. Set by Jenna McFarland. Lighting by Russell Swift. Costumes by Adriana Tulian. Sound and original music by Barry Wyner. With Paul O’Brien, Ken Flott, Chip Phillips, and Forrest E. Walter. At Gloucester Stage Company through August 24. Van Gogh Written and performed by Joseph Kaknes. Directed by Weylin Symes. At the West End Theatre, Fridays and Saturdays through August 30.

Forget about the back of the postcard: Off-Season wants to write on the underbelly. Playwrights Terrence McNally and Israel Horovitz have paired otherwise unrelated one-act plays that unbury violence lurking beneath the beach sand in two very different tourist towns not at the peak of their allure. Key West, where McNally’s clumsily titled Chatter, Yatter, Flotsam & Dross or Ted & Tom & Terry & Terri unfolds in the swelter of August, is a true if culturally garnished Margaritaville. Gloucester, where Horovitz’s The Sins of the Mother takes place in the cold wet of winter, is a town where the sea has always been more than just a place to cool off. No surprise, then, that McNally’s is the more tourist-industry-related work, dealing with a quartet of gay men, two sets of partners who own and operate guesthouses at the southern tip of the Florida Keys. Horovitz, as he has done before, probes reopened wounds and old animosities among townies in a corner of Cape Ann where the fishing industry has been setting less beautifully than the sun over Mallory Square.

This is not the first time that four-time Tony winner McNally and Gloucester Stage Company artistic director Horovitz have teamed up. Back when they were pups, they collaborated with the late Leonard Melfi on the 1969 Broadway triptych Morning, Noon and Night. The three did it again Off Broadway in the 1980s with Faith, Hope and Charity. Melfi died in 2001, and, said Horovitz on opening night of the world premiere of Off-Season (following a reading at the Key West Theatre Festival), he and McNally decided "to do a duet before we had to do a solo." Alas, the duet — in which the same four actors morph from Will and Grace to On the Waterfront — is more of a doodle, reminiscent of but not up to the best work of either playwright.

Sins of the Mother imagines an early-morning encounter among three out-of-work Gloucester stevedores and an apparent newcomer in a derelict union hall. The one-act is most notable for its stunted, colloquial dialogue, which illustrates an insular, provincial, family-obsessed mentality. In Horovitz’s fish-town quagmire, where tangled roots snake back generations, the "Fort Shimmatarros" and the "Riverdale Shimmatarros" are utterly other — and the genealogy is painstakingly traced with the entrance of each new, inquiring-minded character. Yet everyone in the moribund town knows every secret past and present and where every body is buried.

Here the elephant corpse in the room is that of Gloucester recidivist Douggie’s dead mother, once both the town whore and the secret love of blustery ’Nam vet Bobby Maloney, the oldest of the three lumpers who’ve turned up this morning to have their unemployment cards stamped. Douggie, who has recently returned to the area, has heard that there might actually be work at the adjacent fish plant, and he hopes to be on the receiving end of it. But the revelation of the identity of his mother, which is well known to thirtysomething Frankie and Dubbah as well as to Bobby, opens a floodgate of memories, resentments, past crimes without punishment.

Horovitz touches on various spurs to the year-round community’s stagnation: government limits on fishing, drug trafficking (explored in more depth in his bravura Henry IV rewrite, Henry Lumper), the spread of AIDS. But in a 35-minute play, the social history is sketchy. In this dramatist’s best works, notably The Indian Wants the Bronx and The Widow’s Blind Date, the build toward violence is gradual and tense and its arrival inevitable. Here the move between casual repartee turned ominous and the outbreak of mayhem is jarring and melodramatic.

McNally’s depiction of porch-side camaraderie bathed in a chill breeze of savagery is better integrated, but the play’s gay, entrepreneurial denizens are, if less homegrown, equally insular. Terry and Terri are soldiering through the Key West off-season, repairing their rotting sunbathers’ recliners and badmouthing the bargain-hunting pair of Boston vacationers who are sleeping off a late night upstairs, when their friend Ted shows up looking like a pugilist. Ted and his older partner, Tom, also run a guesthouse, though theirs caters to a gay clientele more interested in condom dispensers than in sheets clean enough to eat off. Ted has a sensational albeit callous tale to tell of betrayal, robbery, and a gay bashing turned horrifically on its head. Beneath the alternately glib and sentimental banter among the four, McNally creates an undercurrent of tension, between gays and straights, usurpers and conchs, that belies the easy, literate hedonism for which Key West is known.

Under Thomas Caruso’s direction, the same four actors appear in both plays, moving, like Jenna McFarland’s chameleon set, from heat and highballs to work boots and folding chairs. It’s a stretch, and some cast members are more comfortable at one end of the pulled rubber band than at the other. Powerful Horovitz vet Paul O’Brien (the Hotspur of Henry Lumper) is a brooding, explosive Bobby in Sins, but he’s also credible as the hearty, beat-up, mildly alcoholic Tom of Chatter. Forrest E. Walter is believable as the bruised Ted of Chatter and as the tentative Douggie of Sins. Ken Flott, though more effective as the most flamboyant of the Key West quartet, does make the transition to Gloucester. Smirky Chip Phillips seems more likely to unload a hotel wastebasket than a ship.

Not that the bazookas of Sins of the Mother do any actual lumping. For a hands-on dramatic experience, there’s Gloucester painter Joe Kaknes’s one-man show Van Gogh, during the performance of which the performer, while telling the tormented post-Impressionist’s life story in the first person, actually executes a still life: ridged, swirled, and in vivid color, in the manner of the master.

Of course Kaknes is not Van Gogh; he’s more the Hershey Felder of paint. Felder is the actor and pianist whose popular one-man show George Gershwin Alone finds him both personating the famed American composer and tickling the Steinway with Gershwin’s œuvre, from "Swanee" to Rhapsody in Blue. (We will not speak of Felder’s lugubrious Romantique, in which he plays Chopin.) Kaknes, gray-bearded and sporting a full set of ears, doesn’t resemble the red-haired Van Gogh as much as Felder does Gershwin. But he attempts to replicate the painter’s intensity, both at the easel and in conversation with the audience, which, standing in for a visiting art student, is invited to mill about, have some wine, and keeps its mouth shut. Serving as Van Gogh’s final studio in Auvers-sur-Oise, strewn with Kaknes’s paintings and the tools of the trade, is Gloucester’s 100-seat West End Theatre, once the home of Gloucester Stage Company, and operating under its current management for less than a year now.

Kaknes doesn’t prove a first-rate or even a trained actor. It is disconcerting that his surly Van Gogh, entering with a painting of sunflowers under his arm, immediately displays a New England accent, describing the effort as "gahbage." Yet there is something dangerous, bitter, and explosive, in his lonely if too deliberate Vincent. His relation of the painter’s sad life, from a boyhood spent passing his own gravestone every Sunday (actually that of a stillborn sibling with the same name and birthday) to obsession, isolation, and bouts of madness, is paint-by-the-numbers — a chronological, thumbnail lecture. But there is a lot of information here, and the show ends effectively. First our volatile host tells us in passionate, graphic detail of the drunken night in Arles when he went after Paul Gauguin with a razor and then, in a mad fit, sliced off the lower third of his own ear (which he delivered, as a token, to a prostitute). Then, scrawling "Vincent" across the edge of the canvas on which he’s been working, he sets off, easel under arm, to paint his vision of "green- and yellow-striped fields" and hundreds of crows blocking the sun. Wheatfield with Crows was one of the last paintings he did before shooting himself.

Van Gogh has been the subject of numerous dramatizations, from Vincent Minnelli’s 1956 Lust for Life to Nicholas Wright’s Vincent in Brixton, a Broadway import last season that imagines an affair between the young Van Gogh and his middle-aged London landlady. Relating the events of the artist’s life, Kaknes does not so much show as tell, walking us through Van Gogh’s failed stints: art salesman; evangelist ministering to Belgian miners; partner to Christine "Sien" Hoornick, whom he loved but could not support; possessed artist whose work wouldn’t sell. The real show is watching Kaknes paint, in a bold, reckless way that is itself an homage to Van Gogh. That the performer creates a painting while giving his talk is remarkable, especially given that he doesn’t knock off the same still life at each performance.

On the evening I attended, Kaknes, at a brush- and jar-cluttered counter next to a flower arrangement dominated by day lilies, working his brushes in pools of paint as if stir-frying, began with a wine backdrop, a purple vase, a block of vivid yellow sun on a purple table. Repeatedly running backward to view his work from a distance, he topped the vase with blobs of orange, white, a bit of red that exploded into petals, greens as thick as a sandwich. "It’s all about the paintings," he said, taking his bow. And in this show, it is.