`Charity’s Children’ well worth an evening spent at the theater

Though not a masterwork — how many plays are? — “Charity’s Children” by Timothy Mason is a meritorious piece, well worth spending an evening in the theater. A good-sized, enthusiastic audience greeted this premiere on Friday night at the Penobscot Theatre in Bangor. The play runs through Nov. 29. Mark Torres, the artistic director, is to be roundly congratulated on taking the risk that a new play always entails. In this case, his taste has been vindicated by a drama — with decided comic undertones — that catches one up in its domestic entanglements and sustains one’s interest until the rather melodramatic conclusion.

The relatively small cast of five has been meticulously maneuvered by Lisa Tromovitch, who generally drew captivatingly convincing performances from her charges. Indeed, so carefully did she shape the many confrontations that she almost succeeded in masking a few of the debilities of the play — its primary fault in not fleshing out more fully the sadistic, thoroughly nasty character of Jerry, a kind of pale Stanley Kowloski. Nor, if one assumes that Charity is meant to be the pivotal role, did Mason endow her with sufficient strength, interest and force. She is, in fact, lamentably dim-witted.

What Mason has given us — and occasionally his work rises to a certain muted eloquence — is a ganglionated family group who (apart from Jerry), operate within a code that never completely alienates one from the other. The tower of strength — Charity not to the contrary — is the mother, indubitably the best written role, the one that allows the aging actress who plays her to dominate even when she is absent from the stage (as she seldom is).

One of the most delightful features of this play is, as evinced, its disparate elements of humor, almost always naturally worked into the facile, nicely cadenced dialogue. The black humor of Charity’s speech about her “dead mother” is a case in point. Or her disquisition on the ruined Thanksgiving Day dessert. Mason has nicely spiced the darker moments with explosions of drollery.

In the vital role of the mother, Eunice, a woman whose own marriage has soured and yet who summons the courage to confront life head on, Gerri Owen, despite a few flubs that she effectually covered, carried off her difficult role, alternating between what she sees as an empty life and the courage to prevail against the odds, with plenty of panache and insight. The edge in her voice suggests the ascerbity, the disillusionment of a life gone awry. She is completely credible.

As her ingenuous daughter, Charity, Nancy Walsh manages to enlist the sympathy of the audience in spite of an enervating negativity. Impressionable, sorely lacking the confidence she needs to stand up to her loud, domineering spouse, she demonstrates enough muddleheadedness to arouse some feeling and yet not enough to make her a tragic figure.

Unfortunately, Leslie Adams as Faith, presumably the “strong” daughter who still knuckles under to the demands of her mother, is the weak link in an otherwise admirable cast. She is too superficially drawn, but even so Adams doesn’t delve into her essential psyche. Many of her lines were lost, either because she streaked along too rapidly or because she swallowed her words.

Both the men — John Clancy as Jerry and Stephen McLaughlin as Louis — were well under the skin of their parts. The former may have fallen a little too much under the shadow of Marlon Brando, but he at least enunciates clearly and is especially menacing in Act II when his sneer is cruelly pregnant. McLaughlin, an avuncular presence, has a good sense of timing as when he sniffs, “A man like that (Jerry)…shouldn’t smoke.”

Truth to say, the play lacks that viable momentum that should sweep one along to its climax, but luckily its interest is largely predicated on its pleasant humor and on the generally perspicacious (and literate) character depictions. With a bit of rewriting and a general shoring up of the first act to make a more adequate preparation for the second, it would have an even greater appeal and potential. As it is, one will find it both enjoyable and introspective.