Two's Company

The Woolgatherer contains plenty of twists and surprises.

by Mark Cofta

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The joys of William Mastrosimone's The Woolgatherer lie not in where it goes — we can all guess where a two-person romance is headed — but in how it gets there. The Trenton, N.J., native's 1979 success holds up very well in New City Stage's revival, the best of the young company's season of three Mastrosimone plays, because of the path it takes — and who takes us on the journey.

Amanda Schoonover has a special talent for playing simple, childlike characters, innocents with uniquely skewed worldviews. She completes a season trifecta (after equally brilliant performances in Theatre Exile's Mr. Marmalade and Luna's Grace) with her mesmerizing turn as The Woolgatherer's Rose, a sheltered, damaged recluse who brings a stranded trucker home to her claustrophobic apartment (Chris Madden and Rick Miller's appropriately tawdry set bravely halves the tiny Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5's stage).

We soon recognize that Joe Guzman's Cliff wisecracks ("You know what they say when your truck don't stop: Them's the brakes!") to mask his soul-consuming cynicism. Rose's fragile naïveté attracts and perplexes him (he prods impatiently, "Do you believe in life before death?"). The way Rose romanticizes the world she avoids — although she lives in Philadelphia, she's never even seen the ocean — entices Cliff, but we realize before he does that her gothic stories about pathetically lovesick, suicidal women that offend his bleak dog-eat-dog defeatism may actually be autobiographical. Her rescue (and his own salvation) will require much more than a Bud six-pack and his rough charms.

We can predict, given this is a two-person play, that Cliff will return after escaping at the end of Act 1, but The Woolgatherer nevertheless contains plenty of twists and surprises. Director Neill Hartley allows them to unfold with gritty realism, particularly in each character's heartrending, soul-baring monologues (flogged forever as audition pieces, they're refreshingly powerful when they come from capable actors).

Hartley and his cast's instincts for stillness and silence, as well as brutally raw emotional honesty, pay off in a well-sculpted tale that goes exactly where we expect — a place that, by the end, we're desperately hoping the couple will end up.

(m_cofta@citypaper.net)

The Woolgatherer Through June 1, New City Stage Co., Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut St., 215-563-7500, newcitystage.org