Reeling A ‘movie play’ about moving home BY IRIS FANGER
	Backwater: A Movie Play By William Donnelly. Directed by Dan Milstein. Music by Fred Harrington. Set by Brett Bundock. Lighting by Kathy Maloney. Costumes by Bonnie Duncan. With Irene Daly, Chris Cook, Paul Giragos, Claire Shinkman, George Saulnier III, and Zabeth Russell. Presented by Rough & Tumble Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts through April 10.

The losers of the post-high-school era (and probably post-college as well) who have been out in the world, fallen on their backsides, and crawled back home to mom and dad are the subjects of William Donnelly’s screenplay/drama Backwater, along with some older folks who are not so happy themselves. Matter of fact, the only character in this Rough & Tumble Theatre–produced piece with any hope for the future and boasting a modicum of success is a kid still in high school, a place and time of life that Donnelly seems to view in hindsight as Eden, with graduation an event no less traumatic than the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden.

Donnelly, the resident playwright at Industrial Theatre, wrote Backwater as a film script. But Dan Milstein, artistic director of the seven-year-old Rough & Tumble ensemble, thought to stage the work as a theater piece without revising the format. Calling it Backwater: A Movie Play, he allows for close-ups, segues, and split-screen effects — not to mention offering boxes of popcorn to the audience. It’s not a bad gimmick, but rather than replicating the cinematic cuts from scene to scene by simply changing the lights, Milstein burdens the actors with set pieces and props to be trundled on and off. The conceit also makes for a repetitive blocking scheme, with the actors continually entering and leaving the stage in horizontal patterns. The company lists in the program as one of its goals an "expressive physical performance style," but that’s not evident here. The cast is relentlessly upright and walking.

And Donnelly’s play, in its chronicle of Lea Boyle’s fall from the grace of optimism, less resembles a film than it does several weeks’ worth of episodes from TV soaps. Lea retreats from a failed theatrical venture and an equally dead-end affair to the "backwater" of her parents’ home, where she cuddles up in her red flannel robe with a bowl of cereal and the TV remote and makes a succession of bad-judgment calls in looking for love and a career path. Her romantic choices are straight from cliché heaven: a leftover crush on Mr. Clark, the high-school English teacher — married, of course — who was her mentor but is now relegated to teaching first grade; a brush with Neville, a teenage boy who takes her kindness for encouragement; and a rematch with Wes, the proverbial male best friend who’s ready and waiting for her to find happiness, like the bluebird, in her own back yard.

The unreeling of the plot is not helped by the evenness of both volume and pacing. Resident musician Fred Harrington, playing a keyboard off stage, improvises a fluid musical background that provides some energy. But there’s no building to a climax, no tension, nothing to make you wonder — or care — how it will all fall out. The sequence in which Irene Daly’s Lea pulls out her high-school yearbook and reads aloud the inscriptions while the photographs come to life behind her works well, as does the one where a first-grader stumbles into the classroom to retrieve her bookbag and finds Lea and George Saulnier III’s Mr. Clark in a compromising position that even a toddler could understand. But the remaining scenes stream past like the boxcars of an endless freight train.

Daly, like Saulnier a veteran of past Rough & Tumble productions, makes Lea a sympathetic protagonist. She’s a good listener, with expressive eyes that telegraph her feelings. The five other actors work overtime in multiple roles; Chris Cook is creditable in veering from the coltish Neville to the randy boor Todd to a lounge-rat crooner in Vegas, and so is Paul Giragos in the thankless role of Wes, the good guy and faithful friend.

No doubt a play could be written about the generation that’s been squeezed into a way station by the maelstrom of joblessness and uncommitted relationships that pass for love, but Donnelly’s work never plumbs that theme. And if Rough & Tumble is going to produce a play in the manner of a film, it should either contrast the differences or else appropriate them for comic or experimental purposes.