Also this issue: Trading Spaces Fleisher/Ollman Gallery celebrates a milestone anniversary with a change of location. -Susan Hagen Degas Vu The Art Museum transports you back to Degas' world. -Robin Rice Ballet Lessons A dance critic's perspective on “Degas and the Dance.” -Janet Anderson 19th Annual Celebration of Black Writing -Elisa Ludwig Concerts for the Community -David Shengold Tango Buenos Aires -Deni Kasrel Jeanne Ruddy Dance -Deni Kasrel The Magic Flute -Steve Cohen

February 13-19, 2003

theater

Nocturne

by Toby Zinman

"Fifteen years ago I killed my sister." That's the opening line of this odd, compelling play by Adam Rapp that was nominated for the Pulitzer two years ago. The narrator is a haunted, grief-besotted 32-year-old living a marginal life on the lowest East Side of New York, but tells his awful story with surprisingly clear eyes and good humor. A car accident 17 years before was the pivotal event for him and his parents; nobody recovered, nobody "moved on."

Our narrator, a.k.a. The Son, was a piano prodigy whose best audition piece was Greig's "Nocturne." When he writes an autobiographical novel, which the play both is and includes, it is called Homage to Greig.

Nocturne is the melancholy anatomy of a catastrophe, a family drama in the American tradition, with this twist: It is more a recited novel than an embodied play.

While the narrator narrates, his sister, his father and his mother occasionally appear on stage and mime the action he is describing ("she raised her hand"). In the original production, the program notes tell us, there were five people in the cast; in the second production, Nocturne became a one-man show, as if the author were reading from his novel. Director Tom Reing has decided to split the difference by having a cast of three: Steve Gulick plays his father and Erin Reilly plays both the sister at age 9 and their mother. The weakest scenes are those where the "child" illustrates the events: The sunny tomboy he describes bears no resemblance to the accusatory woman in a girl's dress next to him. Reilly's facial expression in this role is so nasty and spooky and the crayoned picture book she holds up is so cloying that the edgy, disaffected tone the play depends on is compromised.

As The Son, Richard Gary III -- who carries the entire show and talks for the entire two hours -- is remarkably natural and engaging. The naturalness seems remarkable because the play is so overwritten, so larded with metaphor that it is hard to imagine it as human speech. But he pulls it off, and some of the language is startling and interesting: The Steinway sits in the room with "glacial intimacy," "a homicide waiting to happen." The ambulance sirens are "weeping in an octave known only to whales and dolphins," while his father's "fury has a smell like cold undercooked pork."

Of course there's only so much of this you can absorb before your brain goes into simile arrest, but Rapp's is a distinctive voice and Gary's is a performance worth seeing.

Through Feb. 23, Theater Catalyst at 2nd Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330