Blood story
By Brad Rosenstein

Mission Indians is uncompromising and uneven.

GREG SARRIS'S "Joy Ride," from his "novel in stories" Grand Avenue, made for one of Campo Santo + Intersection's most exhilarating productions to date. Presented with Word for Word in that company's verbatim style, the show revealed the writer's vibrant ear for dialogue and a dizzying narrative flair that seemed made for the stage. Sarris has returned to the venue for the premiere of his first major play, Mission Indians, which also focuses on the tangled bloodlines and often bitter destinies of American Indians in and around Santa Rosa. It's a theme that hits home for Sarris, the adopted son of a white couple who later uncovered his own American Indian roots.

The play follows Joey (Sean San José), a gay landscape architect from San Francisco who heads north to meet his newly discovered brother Bob (Michael Torres). While Bob is in fierce denial about their alcoholic father's Indian identity, Joey finds himself drawn to the truths revealed by their aged grandfather (Luis Saguar). Bob and his wife, Meredith (Catherine Castellanos), are also highly suspicious of Joey's ulterior motives and guiltily reveal the money they drained from the father's estate and their further shady plans for the family's assets.

Sarris's gifts for characterization and narrative translate well to drama, but this theatrical outing is an uneven piece of work. The play gets awfully movie-of-the-weekish in its domestic confrontations, and its plot revelations often have a mechanical feel. Oddly, although Sarris's prose often achieves an effortless stylization, the play struggles with those aspects: in particular, the periodic recitations of Indian-related facts by Bob and Meredith's bibliophilic son Jason (played utterly convincingly by Gabriela Barragan) just seem to hang there. The evening's most successful gestures toward more evocative dimensions are Victor Cartagena's marvelous set, an imaginative construction of cardboard, suspended beer bottles, and a mound of earth, and the haunting live music and singing by Heath Wood.

Despite its occasional clunkiness, Mission Indians is gritty, uncompromising stuff, and the fine ensemble dives into it with relish. It's a pleasure to see Saguar playing someone other than a hyped-up guy with a gun, and he delivers Grandpa with a serene, acerbic earthiness. San José and Torres have been growing by leaps and bounds in their recent work, and they discover a sharp, provocative edge to the battling brothers. Codirectors Margo Hall and Nancy Benjamin struggle a bit with the script's uncertainties, and their neatly balanced staging gets over-obvious. But while the evening never takes full theatrical flight, it tells neglected stories with realism and universal empathy.

Rich 'Blue Room'

It's a shame that Nicole Kidman's flash of nudity hijacked all the attention for the original production of David Hare's The Blue Room, because the best news is that it's a really fine play. I can find Hare dry and tiresome in his political-didactic mode, but when he's at his best, as he is here, he realizes a mature and complex human understanding. Adapted freely (and in some cases surprisingly closely) from Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, Hare's update gains enormously from the 100 years that have elapsed since the original, humanizing and deepening Schnitzler's sometimes crass daisy chain of sexual encounters, particularly where the female characters are concerned.

Hare also ups the theatrical ante by having all 10 pairs of couples played by the same two performers, making explicit Schnitzler's concerns with the fluid nature of identity when sex is driving the encounter. This northern California premiere at San Jose's Theatre on San Pedro Square is graced with two splendid actors, Stephanie Gularte and Jonathan Rhys Williams. They have an exceptional chemistry together and craft an unshowy tour de force of rich characterizations, ranging from a fussy politician and his frustrated wife to a pretentious playwright and an affecting young model du jour.

The play's eroticism is both honestly fleshy and emotionally naked. Director Michael Butler frankly engages with both aspects, from the shadow-play costume changes to the characters' compelling games of risk and reveal. Given the repetitive nature of the encounters, the play drags a bit in its final third, but Gularte and Rhys Williams never falter. Butler's simple, elegant staging, Peter Maradudin's brilliant lighting, and a driving sound design by Bryce Dumont make for a sharp, intimate evening. The spectacle of two souls endlessly searching in multiple guises for a connection they don't fully understand is touching, rich, and unsentimental.