‘Traveler in the Dark’ suffers from casting

Marsha Norman’s play “Traveler in the Dark” raises some provoking questions about faith and love. As with her earlier drama, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ” ‘Night Mother,” this play gets at the very stuff of life. It asks: Can we ever really expect to bridge the gap between the fairy tales of childhood and the sometimes harsh realities of adulthood?

That’s what world-famous surgeon Sam Carter is up against. His certainty about his remarkable place in life has been shattered by his inability to save the life of a nurse who had been in love with him since childhood. With his neglected wife and coveted son, Sam returns to the house of his father, a country preacher, for the funeral. What he finds there is a solid smack in the face that neither his fine intellect nor his scientific skill can soften.

In director Lisa A. Tromovitch’s production, playing through Nov. 19 at Penobscot Theatre, the audience is drawn into a setting that is idyllic: the old farmhouse with stonewalls and the span of a bridge across a tiny pond.

Set design Jay H. Skriletz and lighting designer Michael Vicious put the audience effectively into this small-town spot. Even the notoriously cold theater space seems right for this play that brings the chill of late autumn — and the iciness of a lost heart — to the stage. More than anything, however, it is clear that this is a family play in the most complex of terms. It is about how a man comes to understand his deepest and most crucial choices, how he learns to find the light in his metaphorical upstairs window. And few topics could need a home-fire setting as much as this one does.

Because he is one-dimensionally hard-hearted, Sam is never really as interesting as some of the characters in his life. In fact, the most intriguing character — the deceased nurse — has died before the action begins. But there is also Sam’s father, played beautifully by Gardner Howes. He may be Bible beating, he may be implacable in his own righteousness, but he is a man with some depth, and the playwright gives him some of the best lines in the show.

It helps, too, that Howes is a more than capable actor. In this cast of four, he stands out as the professional, as a stroke of vibrancy on an otherwise flat canvas. It’s not the directing but the casting that holds this production back from accomplishing the intensity that Norman surely intended.

Mike Farrell makes his local debut as Sam, and although he has all the stiffness of the jaded surgeon, his line delivery is too static. On opening night, he put the brakes on the action several times — once for more than 30 seconds — because he forgot his lines.

Sharon Zolper, as Sam’s wife Glory, brings the heartbreak of a rejected wife to life. She sometimes oversentimentalizes her lines, but generally serves as the maternal force that all the men in this play seem to need. Trent Packard, Glory and Sam’s young son, has several good moments onstage. Unfortunately, he doesn’t enunciate clearly enough for the audience to catch every word. And if he has the bad luck to be speaking when Farrell is raking the leaves on stage, then it’s impossible to follow the story.

The problems of a solipsistic doctor, his tossed-off wife and a caught-in-the-middle son are not the most interesting topics for a play. But Norman does ably grapple with issues of faith and its promises. And even though the final scene suffers from the cursed cop-out of wrapping itself up too neatly, there are moments in the show that are illuminating.

“Traveler in the Dark” will be performed 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 8:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through Nov. 19 at Penobscot Theatre. There will also be shows 5 p.m. Nov. 11 and 18. For information, call 942-3333.