Also this issue: Reflections Beth Lipman uses glass to recreate and redefine artwork of the past. -Robin Rice High School Reunion -Jim Weaver Bill T. Jones -Deni Kasrel Sounds Like Progress -Juliet Fletcher My Lord, What a Morning -David Anthony Fox

April 11-17, 2002

art

Losing Faith

by Toby Zinman

Missing LinkThrough April 28, InterAct Theatre Co. at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-569-9700

Based on the plane crash in 1996, when a small town high school’s entire 9th-grade French class was killed, Missing Link, a new play by Seth Rozin, tries -- bravely but unsuccessfully -- to ask immense questions about grief. Focusing on one couple whose 13-year-old daughter died in the accident, it attempts an exploration of the uses of and need for religion in dealing with calamity.

Nathan Berman (Seth Reichgott), a nominally Jewish archeologist, clings to science and logic in his need to find out what happened. Gloria, his wife (Catharine K. Slusar), a nominally Catholic social worker of some sort, is tormented not by what happened, but by why. Both are haunted by memories -- of his Jewish grandfather who tells endless parables, of her Catholic mother who says endless rosaries; add a blind gravedigger (the excellent Dave Jadico), a well-meaning rabbi, the missing link himself (Harry Philibosian), and two women who follow sightings of the Virgin Mary around the country (Drucie McDaniel and Maureen Torsney-Weir, who is terrific).

Each character represents an examination of a kind of faith -- the immigrant's European Judaism, the American's reformed Judaism, conventional Catholicism, Christian revelation, fate, luck and the Dallas Cowboys. In a timid evasion of the issues the play sets up, Rozin has his characters retreat into old-time religion. Science is kicked aside without a backward glance. So much for evolution.

Missing Link is about as convincing a portrait of a marriage as it is about theology: Husband and wife make long speeches to each other about their pasts and their daughter -- it sounds as though they'd just met at a party. With the exception of a couple of the minor characters, nobody sounds like a human being; they sound like essays read aloud. There is no emotion stronger than sad, nothing that shows the grief that tears people apart.

Recent disasters have overtaken this play. We have heard so much about terrorism, about racial profiling, about motives and solutions and investigations, that what the play offers seems merely thin and already dated.

And this problem is compounded by the production's peculiarity of tone which Harriet Power's direction does nothing to control; for instance: The first sound we hear is Sinatra singing "Come fly with me," which, in a play about a plane crash seems a shocking choice, one so crass, so eager for the cheap ironical chuckle, that it is hard to know what to think or where to look. This is followed by a joke stolen -- and retold badly -- from Beckett. This is followed by the newly bereaved father wisecracking to the skeleton in his office. Most of the rest is platitudes.

Sometimes stickily sentimental, sometimes sarcastically smart-mouthed, Missing Link takes on far more than it can cope with.