Northern Lights offer quirky kind of theater

Playwright Patricia Scanlon has a thing about coffee. In her two one-act plays, which currently are being staged by Northern Lights Theatre at the art gallery, Space Between, cups of coffee become the central symbols for emotional lives in America. Her characters don’t measure life out in coffee spoons as T.S. Eliot’s did, but by BIG cups of coffee. Really big cups of coffee.

There’s the woman in “Another Cup of Coffee,” an existential monologue about a search for philosophical meaning. Drinking from a coffee cup that’s larger than her head, she frantically considers the ideas of great thinkers and tries to apply their sensibilities to her own life.

Barbara Jill Deluca buzzes through the script as if she were on something a tad stronger than caffeine. She’s a treat to watch, with her stylized movement, funky outfit and flexible face. But it’s hard not to wish that she would slow down and give as much attention to the content to the words as to the particularity of her moves. She starts out so large that she leaves herself little room for growth, and such a frenetic level can be tiring.

The coffee’s on again in “What Is This Everything?” which is set in a diner and takes place over coffee. Sounds normal enough except one of the characters is Trash, a woman who wears a ballet dress and wedding veil, and nervously chews on a candy necklace around her neck. Another is Dirty Diggin Man, a vagrant poet who is afraid of losing his identity to the scathing concerns of modern life. You know you’re not in Kansas anymore when they start biting at the air to rid it of the demons that no one else seems to think exist.

Wayne Merritt, best known as set designer for the University of Maine’s theater productions, shows another side of his constructive ability as Dirty Diggin Man. A character actor of depth and meaning, Merritt knows how to work the words so that they are poetry. Deluca plays opposite him as Trash, and G.B. Henderson effectively plays a waiter and Trash’s father.

Both plays are strange and funny and thought-provoking. In only his second time out with the Northern Lights company, artistic director Kent McKusick is securing a place for himself in the Bangor theater scene. Not only does he put on a theatrical pair of shows, but he serves coffee and creates a welcome-to-my-place atmosphere.

And it works as quirky and intelligent alternative theater in a friendly setting. It’s the kind of buzz Bangor needs in its arts community.

“Another Cup of Coffee” and “What Is This Everything?” will be performed 8 p.m. May 9-14 at Space Between, 23 Central St. in Bangor. For information, call 945-4274. The shows will also be presented May 25 and 26 at The Depot in Greenville Junction, and June 2 at The Left Bank Cafe in Blue Hill.