Playwright: Donald Margulies. At: Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Tickets: 773-728-7529; www.redtwist.org; $20 . Runs through: Jan. 13
The full title of Donald Margulies' play is "Shipwrecked! An Entertainment The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougement ( as told by himself )." This Victorian-sounding broadside leads us to expect a picaresque yarn in imitation of Candide or Tom Jones, and on the surface, that's precisely what we get.
Our raconteur is the aforementioned Louis, a sickly boy whose childhood is steeped in fanciful stories—the Arabian Nights, etc.—spurring him to stray from his London home in 1860 to seek his fortune. He hires aboard a ship bound for the pearl-fisheries off the coast of Australia, little realizing that the next 30 years will immerse him in thrilling events like the typhoon that maroons him—along with the captain's dog—on a desert island, face-to-face encounters with exotic flora and fauna, assimilation into Aboriginal tribes and many more curious experiences before he returns to England, where the popular press first lauds, then questions, his account. Luckily, the skills acquired in his exile enable him to end his memoirs in triumph.
Playgoers may detect in our hero's progress a certain similarity to, say, Robinson Crusoe ( or Pirates of the Caribbean, for that matter ), but the actual tale that he relates is merely a pretext to Margulies' real purpose, which is to showcase the creativity of the four actors whose task is to depict, with the assistance of commonplace objects, their narrative's dizzying array of personalities and locales. The production currently playing at Redtwist Theatre, in repertory with Elemeno Pea ( whose suburban living room is divested of its portable components at the start of our show ), features Matt Browning, Michael C. Countryman, Daniela Colucci and director Ian Frank, who also provides incidental music and twice has his piano bench stolen out from under him to be pressed into service as a giant equestrian sea-turtle.
A canine companion equipped with a pair of tube-sock floppy ears, a menacing octopus fashioned from an armload of pool-noodles and a nautical atmosphere suggested by chanteys gleaned from traditional and modern sources are not without a certain schoolroom charm, particularly since the precocity usually afflicting this genre is largely absent ( playgoers looking for broad-guffaw spoofery will not find it here ). The intimacy of Redtwist's tiny storefront space—audience members seated in one corner of the room may find themselves armed with foam-rubber spears for one scene—likewise prevents the 90-intermissionless-minute running time pushing the cutesiness factor to extremes.
