Jul 11, 2008

Hanging on a 'Prayer'

Play's reach may out step its grasp

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

Minus a bunch of body parts and in a vegetative state, a young soldier returns home from Iraq to his family in the American heartlands, after being blown up by a roadside bomb.

So the story begins in "Homeland Prayer," a new play by award-winning Bay Area playwright Jeff Carter. Carter's wartime melodrama is receiving its world premiere at the Pear Avenue Theatre in Mountain View.

In "Homeland Prayer," the hospitalized son never appears onstage. Instead, all of the action takes place in his family's kitchen, where the tragedy of his injury threatens family unity. The soldier's parents, wife, sister and brother-in-law start pointing fingers at each other.

"Homeland Prayer" ambitiously intertwines themes of war, money, religion, sex, fidelity, alcoholism and unemployment. At times it suggests a connection between the $3 billion a week we spend on the Iraq war and our country's current economic decline.

As it turns out, this family doesn't process its grief very well. The play's recurring theme of born-again religious faith represents a mechanism of denial, rather than healing.

Also, just to note, this is a family that lives on an absurd amount of coffee. Morning, noon and night there is a pot on the kitchen counter, and people are continually pouring themselves a cup. Hey, that much coffee isn't good for you.

Despite its many themes, or maybe because of them, "Homeland Prayer" has trouble finding a clear storyline. The son-in-law's employment and unemployment saga, for example, doesn't clearly link to the injured vet theme.

"Homeland" is also a talky script, with a focus on issues that are offstage or in the past. It also tends to telegraph its storyline in advance.

In the Mountain View production, it takes the actors a long time to establish distinct identities for their characters. The play's initial scene, featuring a grim mother and father (Mary Moore and Bill C. Jones) just back from their first hospital visit, might have benefited from the actors doing some offstage improv work together, such as angry conflict, just before coming onstage, in order to beef up their emotional stakes.

Although set designer Ron Gasparinetti's realistically styled heartland kitchen is interesting to look at, it is also an example of "Homeland's" generic sensibility. The idea that a playwright from left-coast San Francisco would set his play in some vaguely defined place in the American heartland contributes to a sense of cliche. The playwright's voice, in fact, often feels a bit childish.

Further, the way the lighting design has been done, it's hard to know the difference between day and night through the kitchen window, making it difficult to punctuate the time of day visually. Labored set changes between some of the play's 16 scenes occasionally slowed its pacing.

A theme about whether or not God interferes historically in human affairs is one of the play's most interesting questions, but it doesn't appear until the end, and it's not much developed. This was one moment in which the play's issues got bigger and more intriguing, and pulled me into the magic of its story for a moment.

But it was too little too late. More typically, simplistic assessments of our complex world, and unresolved moments of personal pain, dominate in "Homeland Prayer."

Rating: Two stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@yahoo.com.