Throughout the course of the black comedy "Gagarin Way," the actors frequently lose their own way through the interesting but inconsistent script.
The play, showing through April 23 at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, has an interesting premise, but the direction and follow through is weak. The black comedy often finds its actors feeling their way through Scottish accents, one actor in particular repeatedly losing his and then rediscovering it minutes later. Set in a small town in northeast Scotland, the poor accents severely hurt the overall atmosphere of the production.
More specifically, the production takes place in Fife, a town that was financially devastated when Margaret Thatcher closed the mines that were the mainstay of the town's economic productivity. There are many historical and geographical references mentioned in the play, but the theater thoughtfully included brief historical notes in the playbill, which helped in understanding the context of the play.
The production consists of four characters. Ciaran Crawford plays Eddie, a man "interested in violence." Gary, Eddie's accomplice, is played by Ricky Park with great gusto. Their unintended assistant throughout their conspiracy is Tom, normally played by Rodney Raftery, but portrayed by stand-in Eric Hamel at this particular performance. Lastly, Dafydd Rees plays Frank, a corporate honcho who to Eddie and Gary symbolizes everything that is wrong in the world.
The play draws its comedic moments from the strained interactions between these four characters in a stockroom. Eddie and Gary are two low-level workers in a company at which Frank is a top executive; Tom is a security guard who unwittingly helps Garry and Eddie in their murder of Frank for his alleged "crimes against humanity."
The production begins with Eddie and Tom talking back and forth about their lives: Tom went to university and garnered a degree in politics, but Eddie ridicules him for not knowing what to do with it. Eddie, who has worked in the company stocking shelves for more than seven years, is pessimistic throughout the entire play, not only about his own life but the lives of those around him.
While Gary hopes for a grand political statement in killing Frank, Eddie doesn't really need a reason to kill him: he is simply excited by random violence. Tom is inadvertently brought into Frank's murder when he walks into the storeroom to retrieve his security guard hat that he had forgotten. The play extricates humor from the tense situation, and the many unexpected problems that arise.
The Scottish accents were so thick that it took about 15 minutes to become acclimated to the rapid-fire banter between characters. Of course, this is the intended aim of the dialogue, to immerse the viewers in the characters' world. And it would work, if not for Eric Hamel's inability to maintain his accent throughout the play. However, it should be noted that Hamel, as a last-minute stand-in, was forced to rely on the script of "Gagarin Way," reading his way through the entire play. So while Hamel did a commendable job of trying to ignore the script in front of him as much as possible, his sub-par command of the brogue undermined the atmosphere.
The acting runs the gamut from great to merely fair. Rees, playing Frank, is superb, aptly portraying his apathetic attitude towards his own kidnapping and death, an attitude that deflates Gary's high hopes for the homicidal escapade. The tenacity that Crawford brings to Eddie is great, but the character itself is not well written. The audience is supposed to believe that Eddie has stayed in his job for seven years without moving up in the corporate ranks, but considering the passion he displays in his musings on life, politics and existentialism, he seems far from the stagnant type.
Gary vehemently attacks Frank for everything that he stands for, and is played very well by Park, who embodies the big lug with a hulking physical demeanor that does much for the character. The weakest character - and unfortunately the moral center of the play - is Tom the security guard. The script portrays Tom as a na??ve innocent, yet Hamel's portrayal evokes a self-confident character, contradicting the suggestions of the script.
While "Gagarin Way" has intermittently interesting commentary on communism, existentialism and globalization in the 21st century, the play is too narrow in its scope to be called great as a political satire or black comedy. The mixture of the two comes off as forced, mostly because the innocent heart of the play is the weakest of the actors.
