Angels of Lemnos, The

Stage II of Venice Little Theater is known for its gutsy attempts to stage contemporary, even controversial plays, and for winning national community theater awards doing so. The Angels of Lemnos, for instance, requires a Greek chorus (however truncated in size and message), complete with masks (here worn on the backs of actors' hoods when they have to go swiftly to "normal" conversation). The set must permit multi-levels of action indoors and outdoors, weaving between past and present before a close-up audience in a rather small black box, arranged in proscenium-like format. Also needed: two strong male leads playing an older and a younger man supported by five actors filling multiple roles - especially in the latter's past, including pairs of people with completely opposite personalities. Each supporting actor is identified primarily as a Female Form or Male Form with Roman numerals. One also plays a cat named, in a surprise twist, Clarabel. Whoever does the voice of the baby played by a doll is unidentified in the program, however.

Having recently performed a weighty Brecht and a rare Sondheim, VLT Stage II seems to have decided to test its limits. But sometimes going out on a limb leaves you on a dead branch. The Angels of Lemnos is a pretentious portrayal of a jobless young man, Nathan the Anything-but-Wise. Because of a damaged head, a teacher who denigrated him, and a father who deserted him and his mother, after her death Nathan decided to strike out for a better life. Aside from his mother, a few good people were a part of his past. Today, though he is an outcast from society, others - especially Girtie whose wife and children died in a fire caused by faulty wiring in their poor housing -- have become Nathan's friends.

Unfortunately, we're made to see and hear all, weaving in and out of the various illusions and illuminations of his life. Despite a few humorous lapses (mainly Nathan's awakenings to sex) from bathos, we're inundated with Nathan flirting with death, and super-kind Gertie talking him out of it. When Nathan finds another outcast, a baby tossed into a garbage pail, the question of their survival comes into the core of his drama. I'm tempted to say it was rotten up to there, but not because of the meanness or thoughtlessness toward Nathan of people representing society. Rather, the play reeks of do-goodiness, with its homeless heroes not responsible at all for their situation; with society being blamed for not paying attention to or valuing people like Nathan; with no examples of self-made homeless drunks or drug addicts or low-life characters.

I have to hand it to the actors, however, for putting considerable heart into pasteboard characters. Damian Jeremy Stone never lacks credence with all the "flyin'" he's made to simulate. His is a high-octane fling into our sympathies. Neil Kasanofsky's Girtie, more than likeable, skirts the maudlin in his recollections of fatal fires. Sara Trembly's a stitch as Nathan's first girl, Marcy, unforgettably puffy in pink on their first formal date. She switches nicely to a homeless woman, not so sexually virtuous but certainly socially so. Nathan's caring mother is Lynne Buhle's finest turn among three good portrayals, and the same can be said of Elaine Enoch as mother to Marcy. Todd Spas comes off well switching from being Nathan's friends to other, unsympathetic characters. Richard Curcio's kindly doctor is welcome and important amid several men who pass through Nathan's life.

Both the skill of the actors and director Woodland's ability to steer them through precarious shifts in time, space, and mood show how good VLT's Stage II can be. They counterbalance much of the sociological melodrivel.