| Gurney can, for instance, take a stilted naval base dance class, add a slight inflection and give it a veiled erotic charge. A throw-away joke about a GE self-timing rice maker throws into relief Sparky's abiding cultural ignorance, while Julie's observation that American women do indeed read books and possess opinions makes her seem some harbinger of feminism in the tight context of her life.
Limited to this narrow range of character reaction, the play is always in danger of becoming nothing more than conventional theater about conventional people. Gurney's solution is to graft on another set of theatrical conventions entirely - that of Japanese Kabuki theater.
This device - and it is a device - gives the play a spaciousness and formal elegance that it might not otherwise have. A character called The Reader (performed with enthusiasm and precision by Midori Nakamura) is a hip Western version of the narrator from Bunraku puppet theater. Here the Reader verbally introduces scenes, cues shifts of time or mood with the clack of Japanese blocks, and assumes various minor roles from her static position at stage left.
G.W. Mercier's expansive, finely proportioned set echoes Kabuki theater stages in its central projection and partial gravel surround. Sliding panels at the back of the stage quote famous images from Japanese paintings - a landscape by Yosa Buson and, particularly striking, a doubled version of Hakusai's "The Great Wave." The minimal props and accessories are short-stepped in by figures draped in black and wearing black veils. At the beginning of the play one of these masked characters evokes Bunraku puppetry when, to signal the arrival of Sparky in Japan, he scoots across the stage carrying a model airplane on a stick.
The production is superb throughout. Wisely, director Gavin Cameron-Webb treats the script strictly as conventional realistic theater (as Gurney must have intended), leaving any stylizations to the playwright's imported Japanese conventions. The play has a kind of calculated inertness that could go leaden at any moment. In a pretty slight-of-hand, Cameron-Webb keeps it moving along without any discernible revving up of dialogue or action. It's all quite artfully done.
Bowman and Adams are great together, an archetypal 50s wife barely holding down secret desires and a naive, bumbling kid who thinks life is about following the heart wherever it might lead. All four actors have an impressive grip on the '50s types they play, and all are a joy to watch.
But Adams nails her character perfectly. She looks a bit like Dina Merrill and sounds a lot like Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge in Hitchcock's "Vertigo." If that isn't the '50s, what is?
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