By STACY DAVIES Thursday, August 7, 2008 - 3:02 pm

*Poetry 101
Nocturne proves there's a fine line between bullshit and brilliance*

If I told you my grandmother welcomed me into her house, a grave robber hot off a bender of digging up corpses, what would you think? Am I brilliant, or am I full of bullshit? If you answered the latter, you're correct. That is a bullshit metaphor, which, while colorful and readily imaginable, tells you absolutely nothing about my grandmother's disposition, or how I was greeted, or what it meant to either of us. If, however, you liked that creation, then you'll love Rude Guerrilla's latest offering,playwright Adam Rapp's "Nocturne".

I could have a field day shredding what some have proclaimed Rapp's "rich"language, but instead, I'll just give you a sample: Heat coming through a car window like a quilt; gliding like a cigar-store Indian; fury smelling of undercooked pork; a warship in drag; wind as cold as Novocain; something like an imperfect homemade ratchet; a bloodless stone in the throat. If you've seen or felt any of these images, please stop bogarting the J and pass it on.

And thus, Rapp's play, directed by Jay Michael Fraley, is one bloodless stone to swallow (we recall most of them being bloodless, however). Built on language so poetically forced that bowling balls shoved into my eye sockets would have been easier to take (a Rapp-sian nod here), this mostly monologued story might have had merit if I weren't being hammered at everyturn by Rapp's weighty self-indulgence.

The outline has some promise—a 17-year-old accidentally runs over and decapitates his 9-year-old sister. The tragedy rips the family apart, with the mother eventually going nuts and sitting on a park bench singing "Old MacDonald" (which I also don't get, but hey, it's "kooky", and that's what counts). The father offers to blow his son's brains out, which prompts the son to run away to New York, where he becomes a novelist and writes the fictionalized story of the tragedy to moderate success. We, the audience, have no idea why the parents react the way they do—after all, it was an accident, and he "is" their son—but whatever.

Now we're in New York, where the son discovers he's impotent after he meetswhat I'll call the highly fictionalized "Girl Who Will Save You." I've beentold by umpteen novels, movies, plays and songs that this girl exists, andmen are searching for her far and wide. This saintly (and, of course,breathtakingly gorgeous) girl even stays with the son after she finds outthey can't have sex because hey, girls don't really care about stuff likethat—apparently, as long as you make them laugh, it doesn't matter how bigyou are or when you can perform.

The son, being chivalrous and not wanting the girl to go without any bungle in the jungle, breaks it off and wallows in the tragic shadow he can't shake. News soon comes that the father is dying, so the son reluctantly goes to his side. I won't give away the ending . . . but that's because I'm not sure there is one. While many tangible things do occur in this story (amid the snarled and knotted imagery), the emotional core—the character's journey into self and back out again—remains a mystery.

And while characters don't always have to have some bonfire of enlightenment or a dramatic shift in thought, if a weight is eventually lifted (which seems to be the case here), goddamn it, let us know what it is and how it happened. You don't need to sky write it over our heads like some fruity Lindbergh, just take time off from the tilt-a-whirl tongue and give us the dialogue (or monologue) bits that actually reveal something internal about the person we're supposed to be getting to know. Or else we end up like cocooned butterflies on a salty beach island. Or something like that.

*Nocturne* at the Rude Guerrilla Theater, 202 N. Broadway, Santa Ana, (714)
547 4688; www.rudeguerrilla.org. Sat., 4:30 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. Through Aug.
31. $10-$20.

How fitting that the lead character of "Nocturne" starts out as a budding concert pianist and winds up a solitary writer. How fitting that he finds a job in a used bookstore, where one of the perks is a free supply of the merchandise – fitting because his narration sounds like a great work of literature.

A few other aspects of Adam Rapp's poetic 2001 play, in its Orange County premiere as Rude Guerrilla Theatre Company's current second-stage production, are also fitting.

The solitary young man is forced to confront a terrible accident from his past. The way he chooses to come to terms with it spares neither him nor the audience.

None of the characters have names. In what is normally a one-man show, the anonymous narrator, played by Scott Barber, is joined on stage by Carolyn Kelly as mother "Jan" and Rick Kopps as father "Earl." Jay Michael Fraley's fluid staging, though, refers to them in the program as, respectively, "The Son," "The Mother" and "The Father," which lends the play a faintly religious cast.

Maddy Fitzgibbons, as the narrator's kid sister, and Charis Walth, as his girlfriend, are seen only in film clips. To detail his relationships with any of these four characters is to spoil what is a delicate plot wrapped around a tragedy that seems to strike at only one person, the narrator, but whose ripples reverberate throughout the family.

Like his protagonist, Rapp was raised in Joliet, Ill. Hopefully, that's where the similarities end, for Barber's character is both an all-American boy-man and a haunted specter. "Nocturne" is literary and descriptive, like a great novel, and Fraley's staging of it is lovely, understated and bittersweet.

Like the facts so deftly analyzed by the narrator, "Nocturne" doesn't ask for our empathy – it just is what it is. Were it to press harder for emotion, we might not feel much. Because Rapp's writing is so restrained, he lends the play power, making it easily the equivalent of the biographical fiction of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.

Like those revered authors, the narrator knows things about his family that only he could know. Accordingly, Barber is pensive and thoughtful, his voice gentle and self-deprecating, his eyes piercing and hollow. His frame is as delicate as we would imagine the character's should be, and Barber is warm enough for us to relate to even while stating his character's mantra, "I don't do well with people."

Sound designer R.J. Romero uses Dustin O'Halloran's poignant, haunting piano work throughout to fine effect. David Beatty's cinematography flickers like memories which burn alternately bright and dim. In flashbacks, Barber looks like a teen, and a photographic montage of great writers of the past two centuries is a wonderful touch.

As wonderful is the melding of crafting a novel on an Underwood with playing a Chopin nocturne on a 1942 Steinway, the meshing of reality and memory, of life and death.

What may seem to be familiar clichés are, in reality, thoughtful truths relatable to anyone – even if you're not a writer haunted by a life-changing event from your past. It thereby makes sense that the narrator craves anonymity, the better with which to act as a stand-in for any of us. How fitting.

Freelance writer Eric Marchese has covered entertainment for the Register since 1984.

Online: www.rudeguerrilla.org

Contact the writer: emarchesewriter@gmail.com

The Stage Door Swings - Nocturne by Adam Rapp

The question at the root of any great piece of art may well be, “where is the line between this work and life itself.” In his play Nocturne, now in production at the Rude Guerrilla Theatre in Santa Ana, playwright Adam Rapp doesn’t simply ask that simple question. Instead, he makes that line the very subject of his play. In Nocturne, the line between art and reality is not merely thin, it’s jagged and even, at times, blurry and hard to decipher; perhaps it’s more often so than we are willing to admit. Mr. Rapp’s border is also constantly moving, a fact which both the astute critic and the sane human being are well aware. Indeed, Nocturne presents the border between art and reality as a puzzle, an odd misshapen object to be deconstructed, then reconstructed again. Nocturne is centered on a single event in the life of a young author. Mr. Rapp doesn’t give his author a specific name; he simply calls him “The Son.” On an unspecified day in the author’s past, this Son is involved in an automobile accident which cost him the life of his little sister and the trust of his family. He eventually leaves for New York and even enjoys a literary near miss, but through all his misadventures, the death of his little sister remains the unmovable object around which he must navigate. Some reconciliation eventually does come, but it’s incomplete and it comes far too late.

            Adam Rapp’s Nocturne is a straight forward, no-nonsense kind of play. Despite its lack of sentiment, however, Nocturne is also a tearjerker. If I had my way, Nocturne could use a good trimming, but the story it tells is very compelling and Mr. Rapp’s storytelling is focused and strong. This Rude Guerrilla production is directed by Rude Guerrilla Co-Artistic Director Jay Fraley and it features a first-rate cast; with Rude Guerrilla productions, this is most often the case. Nocturne is, simply put, a tour-de-force for the actor playing Mr. Rapp’s author. Scott Barber delivers a jarring, breath-taking performance. He opens with the play’s central fact: “I killed my little sister.” He repeats this fact with a searing, implacable kind of simplicity. In an odd way, the near whimsy of his delivery transposes his accident into our skeletons. Mr. Rapp never allows his author to escape coming to terms with his past, but Mr. Barber does so with enough honesty and simple grace to become our champion.

            Rick Kopps plays The Father. He ages with ease and grace from a murderously angry middle-aged man to a dying man finding a way around his own regrets. Carolyn Kelly plays the Mother. She delivers an excellent performance, but she isn’t given enough stage time to be able to judge accurately what she can do. The rest of the cast, Maddy Fitzgibbons (The Sister) and the Redheaded Girl (Charis Waith) comes to us by way of a series of still shots and live-action film sequences designed by Mr. Fraley and shot by David Beatty. The film elements added just the right amount of memories, even dreams, to this production. Mr. Fraley’s set, a few furniture items flanked by American literary masterworks of the 20^th century, is as simple, even as spare as Mr. Rapps’ play and Mr. Barber’s performance. Shannon Lee Blas’ lights are as simple and unpretentious as the set. R.J. Romero’s sound combines Classical music favorites, modern soft rock a la Aimee Mann and cityscape noises into a pleasant, effective whole.

            The question at the root of great art may well be, “where is the line between art and life itself?” For Adam Rapp, in his play Nocturne, there may well be no line between life and art. Art, in fact, may well be the only way to come to terms with the events of our lives as they happen, and as they have happened. Art may well be just a way to look at the world from more than one perspective at the same time, just as Picasso did in his Cubist masterpieces. We are only as alive as the number of perspectives, or, rather, facets, we are capable of seeing at the same time.  

                                                                                    --Keith David Dillon