John Patrick Shanley’s poetic “Sailor’s Song” receives a stunningly realized production at New Village Arts Theatre though April 29. It is one of the most perfect marriages of text, visual effects and performances that readers are likely to see all year.
In this delicate, impressionistic, dance-filled work, Shanley ” recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for “Doubt” and the Academy Award for “Moonstruck” ” touches upon life, death and family issues between two sailors, uncle and nephew (Doren Elias and Manny Fernandes, convincingly alike as two peas in a pod), who have never been particularly close. Uncle John’s much younger wife, Carla, is in a coma, dying of cancer. Despite John being a drunkard and wastrel in Rich’s eyes, he has come to ease John through Carla’s death.
The action takes place now in an American South Atlantic coastal town, where John and Carla live in a ramshackle cabin raised on stilts.
Scenic designer Nick Fouch divides the Jazzercise Inc. playing area into cabin stage left and a bar stage right. When Nick enters it is to impart the illusive memory of what viewers see. At the end of the play, one feels overwhelmed, transformed by its gentle beauty, its whimsy and its human truth.
The unmarried Rich meets two women in the bar. Sisters, they are as dissimilar as women can be. A seer of sorts, the blond Joan (Amanda Sitton) receives automatic dictation from a man seven years deceased. Self-described as “real,” Joan’s sister, Lucy (Amanda Morrow), though equally beautiful, works in a bank. In her own way, each casts a spell over Rich, who in the play’s most glorious, magical moments, takes them for a ride in Uncle John’s rowboat.
Whatever and whoever they are, the women are intricately involved in all that transpires between John and Rich. Sitton and Morrow are among the newly named members of New Village Arts Ensemble. They are are extraordinary dancers, tutored by former dancer Robin Christ and Kathy Meyer. They look fetching in Jessica John’s slightly otherworldly frocks. Christ’s dancing is a marvel, and her work with Fernandez and Elias ” who hasn’t danced much since a 1996 injury ” is simply miraculous.
Perfectly cast, the actors turn in extraordinary performances under the direction of founding executive director Kristianne Kurner, who brings out the play’s richness and humor without destroying its delicacy. Any work in which moonlight elicits spontaneous dance is beyond one’s expectations. But onlookers are warned in Rich’s initial speech, in which life is compared to a dance: “You are the dancer, and the music is playing like a blue river around you.” As the playwright says, the play “is about the almost unbearable beauty of choosing to love in the face of death.”
“Sailor’s Song” plays at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, at 4 p.m. Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday. The Studio at Jazzercise inc. is located at 2460 Impala Drive in Carlsbad. For tickets and information, visit www.newvillagearts.org or call (760) 433-3245.
