Five Flights

TWO SEASONS BACK the Shotgun Players' production of Adam Bock's Swimming in the Shallows trumpeted the arrival of a wonderful new Bay Area playwriting talent. Quirky, surprising, and extremely funny, Shallows rushed its characters headlong into the heart of their obsessions, staying true to its own wild logic along the way. I've been eagerly awaiting the next Bock play ever since, and Encore Theatre Company is delivering it to kick off its first three-play season at the Thick House. Five Flights, with its central avian metaphor, is a worthy zoological follow-up to Shallows, which numbered a shark among its characters.

The major character in Five Flights is actually a building, a dilapidated aviary that is the chief inheritance of Ed, Bobby, and Adele. Built by their father to house a wren that he believed embodied his late wife's soul, the structure equally serves his children as a repository of misplaced hopes. Adele (Lisa Steindler) is repairing the aviary as a church for her friend Olivia (Alexis Lezin), who has founded her own religion inspired by birds. Ed (Liam Vincent) assists in the venture, eagerly followed by Tom (Craig Neibaur), a pro hockey player who desperately wants Ed to return his love. Bobby is represented by his rapacious wife, Jane (Dawn-Elin Fraser), who wants the aviary torn down and the land developed.

Five Flights is a fable of faiths in collision, each of its characters desperately looking for something or someone to believe in, each attempting to share his or her faith or impose it on others. For much of its length the play takes frenzied wing with infectious comic riffs and delectable characters, particularly the loopy preacher Olivia and Tom's gruff teammate Andre (Kevin Karrick), who finds an unexpected place in the ménage of believers and agnostics. Kent Nicholson, whose stylized direction of Shallows constrained that play somewhat, crafts a gem of presentational staging here, in perfect sync with Bock's self-conscious structure.

It's that structure, unfortunately, that is the chief limitation of Five Flights, which echoes its titular number throughout, particularly in a description of the five-act form of classical ballet. The play explicitly adopts that shape as its own, and it's a clever but unconvincing model. The play soars through its narrative portion with the greatest of ease, but the subsequent "acts" feel imposed, and the play loses steam as it strains toward a conclusion of difficult grace.

Still, Bock remains a tremendously exciting talent. He's an original who reveals his people and their concerns with skill and compassion and who boldly experiments with form to extend his theatrical reach. You couldn't ask for a better production than this one by Encore, an adventurous company that seems to be hitting its stride. The entire ensemble is superb, especially Lezin, as a brilliantly unhinged Olivia, and Karrick, who is hilarious as Andre. Together, it all adds up to the most rewarding evening I've spent in a theater this New Year.

Adult entertainment

I hadn't been to the Next Stage in a while, so I was amazed to see the changes Combined Art Form Entertainment has wrought. This once dowdy, awkward church space has been transformed into a handsome small theater with state-of-the-art multimedia capability. Artistic director Matthew Quinn's latest production, In Love and Sex, a trio of literary adaptations exploring erotic themes, is a good match for the space. The evening's first piece, A Defense of the Social Contracts, Dan Wilson's adaptation of Martha Soukup's chilly tale of passion in an antiseptic future, gets a boost from Ben Yalom's elegantly simple staging. Marcie Prohofsky effectively charts the growing obsessiveness of the lead character, but the chemistry is weak between her and Titus France as the object of her desire.