New Company Is Off to a Good Start

Since hardly anyone knows about Shoreditch Theatrical Productions--the Valley’s newest theater company--it’s probably a smart move for Shoreditch to do a play almost everybody knows about as its first production: “Marvin’s Room.”

The late Scott McPherson’s only full-length play has been universally embraced. It’s the ideal drama for the “I-feel-your-pain” culture--an AIDS play without uttering the “A word,” as Larry Kramer once noted.

Its central concerns are not about terminal illness, though death’s prospect haunts many of its characters. The play is about family ties that bind or provide love. All of us know at least one type in “Marvin’s Room,” making it an ideal way for this stranger to the Valley theater scene to get acquainted with its audience.

Los Angeles stage veterans such as Don Frabotta, Stephanie Shayne and director Peter Parkin are part of the group, and they know how to put a show together. Although their new home at Valley College’s Horseshoe Theatre has a semi-arena stage that’s much too spacious for the play’s action, Parkin’s production is usually fluid and graced by beautifully modulated performances. If an actor’s mission is to extract humanity from text, then mission accomplished.

Mary Rings gives a performance that especially resonates as Bessie, the play’s emotional center, a never-married woman in Florida caring for her dying father, Marvin (Kort Falkenberg), and ill aunt (Gerry Lock). From a doctor (Eric Boles) who cannot recall his patients’ names, Bessie learns she has leukemia. (This is one of several cases of McPherson’s taste for comedy feeling inserted rather than organic.) Bessie needs a bone marrow transplant, her best hopes for matches being her long-absent sister Lee (Shayne), Lee’s troubled older son Hank (Luis Garcia) or her shy, younger son Charlie (Nick Boles.

Rings is so thoroughly inside Bessie’s skin that we tend to ignore the play’s TV-movie plot devices and follow this selfless woman’s journey, which is really to understand everyone she comes in contact with. Her largest challenge is the estranged Lee, who fled to Ohio when Marvin’s health declined and has no idea how to connect with Hank, who has been in a mental hospital since he set fire to their house. Rings’ Bessie quietly struggles with her own limitations and death and never feels she has “wasted” her life, as Lee implies. Shayne’s Lee is a fascinating portrait of deeply confused motherhood in which a woman is mystified at others’ (namely Bessie’s) ability to talk to those (namely Hank) whom she should be talking to herself.

When a production gets this thoughtful a performance from a student actor, such as Garcia, it signals the company knows what it wants.

BE THERE

“Marvin’s Room,” Valley College’s Horseshoe Theatre, 5800 Fulton Ave., Van Nuys. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 30. $12-$15. (818) 947-2790. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.