'By The Sea' at the Ex

If By The Sea had quit while it was ahead, it wouldn't have been an especially good play, but it certainly wouldn't have been an especially bad one. Which, unfortunately, it is. Ron Levin's forty-minute one-acter gives signs, at first, of turning into a quietly amusing comedy. But toward the end, which is close enough to the beginning to make abrupt changes disconcerting, the play becomes heavily philosophical, expiring with a great cry of hoarse, straight-from-the-soul spiritual agony.

The action is set on a desert containing a tree, a rubber raft, some seashells, two men and a woman. The men and the woman have a number of problems, the main one being that the sea has disappeared. They know that there must be a sea--the presence of the shells can be explained in no other way--and they have built their lives around the expectation of the sea's return.

This is the triangle-on-a-desert-island situation favored by magazine cartoonists. Levin's contribution, the absence of water, adds to the situation's comic possibilities. And except for the final fifteen or so minutes of the play, these possibilities are fairly well explored.

Levin is partial to the kind of playful verbal humor which Eugene Ionesco used brilliantly in The Bald Soprano. Sometimes the dialogue falls flat: "I was trying to catch a fly." "Why?" "Why? Would you have me catch a cold instead?" But more often it is mildly amusing, as when one of the men logically demonstrates that the tree is not a tree. The funniest moment in the play, though, is not verbal at all; it comes when the other man is unable to zip up his fly.

What happens at the end is not worth dwelling on. Briefly, the sea, the desert, the raft, etc., suddenly and inexplicably become big, clumsy symbols. At that point the play instantly loses all its life and laboriously struggles to its pretentious finish.

The three actors have to bear the brunt of this sudden change in the play's rhythm and tone. On the whole they do a good job, especially Skip Ascheim as the perplexed, somewhat farshimmelt Sidney. James Barcz is vaguely English and properly irritable as Walter. He has the misfortune to have to deliver the final blood-and thunder speech, which is totally out of keeping with the character he builds up. Pam King, a black-haired girl with a voluptuous figure, plays Candy a bit too sullenly, though she occasionally is the joyous little animal she should be.

The director, Doug Connor, moves his actors well; he has a sense of how to use an arena stage like the Experimental's. Connor's set is flat and sandy; it looks like a desert.