Miles, a student player in a Canadian college thespian troupe,
figures he knows something about theater’s power to illuminate,
reveal and transform.
He’s read all about it in “Hamlet,”
Shakespeare’s tragedy about the Danish prince who discovers the
play’s the thing to reveal secrets whispered by ghosts.
That’s all just academic prelude, however, to the real-life
drama lesson Miles learns from two old men and their elusive
ghosts of memories in “The Drawer Boy,” the Michael Healey
dramedy that opened Friday at Evansville Civic Theatre.
Inspired by “The Farm Play,” a real 1972 theater project in
rural Ontario, Canada, “The Drawer Boy” follows Miles as he
moves in with Morgan and Angus, a pair of aging bachelor
farmers, to research and write a collaborative play about the
locals.
His experience begins as an absurdist comedy with both men.
There’s Morgan, who plays on the city boy’s gullibility,
assigning him ridiculous tasks like washing gravel with a
toothbrush and getting up at 3 a.m. to rotate the crops.
And then there’s Angus, a perpetually confused character who
lost his short-term memory to a World War II head injury,
requiring Miles to re-introduce himself even moments after their
last encounter.
In the course of it all, Miles discovers a constantly
reprised piece of private theater, a kind of interactive
bed-time story Morgan and Angus share daily, that unlocks
dramatic revelations Morgan desperately wants to keep hidden.
All of that came through with a wry humor and a haunting
humanity in the show’s final dress rehearsal, performed before a
small audience Thursday.
It played out effectively on Charles Julius’ weathered,
raked, single-set scenic design, allowing scenes to play inside
and outside the farmhouse. Jon Isaac Lutz’ recorded
instrumentals helped maintain the continuity between scenes,
especially during some longer blackouts in the rehearsal.
Director C. Lynn Kinkade’s three-member cast of veteran
players delivered a sweet, funny, affecting preview performance
that ran nearly two hours, with one 15-minute intermission.
The story revolves around Steve Small’s sweetly nuanced
performance as Angus. Small subtly revealed the layers of
confusion, fear and loss underneath Angus’ sometimes comic
befuddlement, building a solid foundation for the play’s
dramatic revelations.
As Morgan, Mark Atchison was a taut complex of emotions,
struggling to maintain control over his own theater — the little
comedies he casts Miles in and his relentless plot to rescript
his and Angus’ past — as it all unravels.
And John Kozloski made an engagingly convincing
transformation as Miles, taking his character from gullible
innocence through accidental discovery to a new level of
understanding for the power of theater.
