By Joseph Hurley
PEARLDIVERS, by Tim Marks. Directed by David Hayden. Featuring Calvin Gladen, Richard Lester, Sean Heeney, Tom Delehanty, Kevin Lee and Michael Worth. At American Theatre of Actors, 314 West 54th St. Through Sept. 5.
The title of Tim Marks’s harsh, stinging slice of small-time London East End criminal life, "Pearldivers," is a slang expression usually referring to no hopers who habitually take casual, short-term jobs washing dishes in restaurant kitchens, which two of the play’s six characters apparently do.
Late in director David Hayden’s production of the play, on view through Sept. 5 at the American Theatre of Actors, there is a single, somewhat muffled reference to the title, but, like much of the text, it’s clouded and obscured by the melange of heavy British and Irish accents and indistinct speech to be found in the otherwise talented six-actor cast assembled for the occasion.
On one recent evening, the spectators were grilling each other during the intermission as to where the play was taking place and precisely what the relationships linking the characters might be.
The production’s lack of clarity, quite probably reflecting a certain murkiness in the text, is a pity, since there is genuine energy in "Pearldivers," although the play itself couldn’t be said to be strikingly original.
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Here, once again, we are invited into a shabby London dwelling, this time a "squat" inhabited by a restless collection of petty criminals and wannabes looking for their next illegal opportunity.
Three of the half-dozen denizens of the crumbling rooms are Irish, while the remaining trio are Brits of one description or another. In both the nationalities and activities of its participants, "Pearldivers" recalls at least a couple of plays seen in the area within the last couple of seasons, Jez Butterworth’s "Mojo" and Daniel Magee’s "Paddywack," the former done last season at the Atlantic Theatre and the latter seen first at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre and then, in a superior production, at the Macalla Theatre’s Bronx home.
In all three plays, hard-pressed Irish immigrants collide with their British counterparts, in a sleazy nightclub in the Butterworth melodrama and in a North London boarding house in Magee’s drama.
In "Pearldivers," the wretched domicile is more or less overseen by the thief, Ally, played with convincing force by Tom Delehanty, who determines who may or may not be allowed to stay, and who might serve as a partner or a dupe in his plans to rob a warehouse.
Seemingly long-term tenants, the Irish Ronny and the thorny Briton, Terry, are played by, respectively, Sean Heeney and Richard Lester. The quiet, withdrawn Prof, a book thief and the eldest member of the group, is nicely done by the scarecrow-like Michael Worth, while Kevin Lee is the energetic Brucia, who pays the odd visit without becoming deeply involved in the goings on among the squatters.
But it is a drug-addicted, strangely immature newcomer, Spiv, ostensibly a cousin of one of the regulars, whose arrival serves to stir the plot’s rather rancid plot. Played engagingly by the gangling Calvin Gladen, Spiv is an odd mixture of corruption and vague innocence, antagonized by some of his colleagues, protected by others, and desired, as it seems, by at least one of them.
Marks, a Welsh-born writer resident in the United States, has written, in "Pearldivers," a play that is virtually plotless but not eventless. It is also the central part of a loosely strung trilogy called "Tricolour Travellers," which director Hayden, who staged the first segment, "Locating the Plant, " at ATA in February 1996, refers to as being concerned with "the Irish diaspora," while the author describes it as "examining the myth of the home as seen through the eyes of the Irish."
Hayden’s cast, to judge from clues in the program and sounds, distinct and otherwise, coming from the stage on West 54th Street, would appear to be made up of one Irishman, three Englishmen and two Americans, all of them, to one degree or another, struggling to meet the demands of the argot-ridden, quirky, but not uninteresting text Marks has provided.
A calendar on the back wall of the spectacularly scruffy squat sitting room reads 1995, which is a bit of projection on the author’s part, since a program note says that the play was written in 1994. The present ATA staging, the first the play has received is the work of a group called Hand Rubbed Productions. It’s tempting, perhaps, to suggest that, with a bit more playing, the show should logically be expected to acquire some much-needed polish.