Things seem just a little off before the lights go down in Davie for the start of Still the River Runs. The dark-mud colored backdrop seems to be more Old-West desert than Central Florida ranchland-turning-suburbia, and the recorded-live-with-audience gospel music seems too loud for the tiny Black Box Theater at Nova Southeastern University. But then The Promethean Theater production of the Barton Bishop play begins, and under the direction of Margaret M. Ledford, the two-man comedy-drama is revealed as a nuanced and moving look at the closeness and distance of family relations, the slipperiness of memory, the toll of war and the consequences of youthful indiscretion. Oh, and there's an impersonation of a chatty whale. That's a lot to fit into a play that takes just 75 minutes to unwind.
TPT, which opens its fifth season with this new play, does quite well by it. The story: Brothers Wyatt, single and on leave from the war in Iraq, and Jesse, married with children, are reunited at home, not far from Disney World, to bury their grandfather. Jesse's loath to plant him in a cemetery that soon will be hemmed in by a subdivision, so the brothers steal the body and embark on a road trip to bury Paw-Paw in woodland that hasn't yet been encroached. Mark Duncan's Jesse is the big, good ol' boy, whale-impersonating older brother who married young and doesn't like the changes he sees in his hometown.
Scott Genn's Wyatt is a wounded soul, reading from Kahlil Gibran, correcting Jesse's metaphors and teasing him about their namesakes, Jesse James and Wyatt Earp.
Duncan and Genn make a seamless team. Their tone is right, their body language is right, you can believe they're related. You pull for them. And perhaps it's no coincidence that Paw-Paw had one glass eye and had trouble speaking because of laryngectomy (in an effective turn by Duncan); as his grandsons come to realize they see only parts of each other's lives even as they struggle to communicate their fears and concerns.
Tech is terrific, especially the driving-in-the-dark-with-the-radio-on-and-trucks-going-by combination of sound and music (by seemingly ubiquitous pro Matt Corey) and the lighting by Robert Coward. The set that seemed so distracting can be justified by the play's mention of a forest fire.
But Bishop's play, which was produced in New York a few months ago, has its problems. In what might be an effort to address the generation between the brothers and the grandfather, we get an early bit about Wild West icons (dad named the boys) and some talk of a questionable shooting involving 116 rounds of ammunition.
Also, scenes are preceded by hard-to-read titles above the stage. They seem mostly superfluous, and although they give the audience something to look at during the blackouts that separate the scenes, the cast and crew do a good job with quick changes. Bishop does well, too, with pacing his scenes. They can be short, even wordless, and a black-comedy laugh from the audience can give way in seconds to a lump-in-the-throat appreciative silence.
