The Rogue Theater Company’s production centers hope and characters’ rediscovery of what makes life worth living
By Lee Juillerat for the Ashland.news
Two actors play 15 characters in a fast-paced, mesmerizing play filled with laughs and heartache. Set in rural Ireland, “Stones in His Pockets” is a head-spinning, you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it production featuring veteran actors Dan Donohue and Ray Porter. They’re strutting their stuff at the Grizzly Peak Winery’s newly named Richard L. Hay Center at the Rogue Theater Company.
“Stones” is a complex play, one that tickles the funny bone and, at times, is also soberingly painful. It takes place in a farming village in County Kerry, Ireland, where a Hollywood film crew is scrambling to meet production deadlines. With its twists and turns, the story is involving. But it’s Porter and Donohue who are truly remarkable in the “two-hander,” a term used for a play or film where only two people take on multiple roles.
In “Stones,” Donohue and Porter seamlessly shift personas, always at a dizzying pace. There are no major costume changes. Instead, and remarkably, the character switches are done through gestures, changes in posture, or by putting on a hat or scarf. There are changes in speech patterns — Porter’s honey-sweet voicing of the film’s beautiful star, Carolyn Giovanni, is hilariously delightful while he shifts persona as Jock, Carolyn’s gruff, no-nonsense Scottish security guard.
Donohue and Porter, when playing the two main characters Jake and Charlie, speak with Irish accents, while in zippy-quick character switches they become various members of the American film crew and lose their accents. The changes are fast and convincing. Through their expressions and gestures, Donohue and Porter demonstrate that acting is far more than just reciting words from a script.
Written by Marie Jones, “Stones” has a strong production history in the U.S., England, and of course, Ireland, where it was first staged in 1996. The dialogue is rich and insightful with abundant humor. In the first act, for example, when Jake realizes that Caroline is approaching him, he breathlessly tells Charlie, “Jesus, I can feel my tongue tying itself in a knot.”
There’s humor too, when Simon, one of the film’s assistant directors, while speaking on a walkie-talkie, tells another sub-director that Clem, the director, is “not happy with the cows. The cows. He says they’re not Irish enough.”
But as the story evolves, its tone shifts, becoming a tragicomedy when it’s learned that Sean, a local youth who has problems with low esteem and drugs, drowns himself by walking into water with stones in his pocket, a form of suicide that has a history in Southern Oregon. Sean’s decision was spurred after he was humiliated and removed from a bar while trying to meet and impress Carolyn.
The suicide causes Jake and Charlie, who like most townspeople are extras in the film, to reflect on their own lives and their own challenges. As Jake tells Caroline about how Sean’s death was impacting him, he describes it as “very hard … and more so when I think of the way I treated him, the way you and everybody else treated him like he was a piece of muck on their boots.”
Jake, Charlie and the other locals in the tightly-knit community are appalled and angered when the film’s directors say a delay in filming would result on expensive film production costs, callously insisting they work on the day of Sean’s funeral.
Throughout the play Charlie carries what he believes is the script for a film that will catapult him to fame and fortune — “I have my script … I have something.” During a verbal spat, Jake reveals that he’s read the script, saying, “it is the biggest load of oul bollicks I have ever read in my life.”
‘People don’t go to the movies to get depressed. They go the theater.’
But, as Jake rethinks their situation, he suggests that Charlie write another script, one about “a film being made and a young lad commits suicide. In other words, the stars become the extra and the extras become the stars, so it become Sean’s story … and all the people of this town.” And, as Charlie expresses doubts, Jake persists, admitting, “we have nothing, and we are going nowhere, but for the first time in my life I feel I can something … they can only knock us if we don’t believe in ourselves … and I believe this could work, Charlie, I do ….”
When they advance their idea for a movie to one of American producers, they’re told, “Movies aren’t real life … How many people want a movie about suicide? People want happy endings. Life is tough enough. People don’t go to the movies to get depressed. They go the theater.”
By the play’s end Jake and Charlie have regained hope. Sean’s death becomes a tragedy that helps them rediscover life. By the play’s end there is hope.
During a “talkback” session after the play, director John Plumpis, along with Dan Donohue and Ray Porter, suggested that a film version of “Stones” would likely be less impacting than the play, saying, “imagination does more with less,” a reference to audiences using their own life experiences to self-reflect.
“Stones in His Pockets” is being presented Wednesdays through Sundays at 1 p.m. indoors at the Grizzly Peak Winery until Aug. 4. The play runs two hours with an intermission.
For information and tickets — many performances are already sold out — visit the website at roguetheater.company.com or call 541-205-9190.
Email freelance writer Lee Juillerat at [email protected].
This review mentions suicide. Individuals in crisis or looking to help someone else who is can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988, or visit 988lifeline.org for more resources.
