An Angel at the Type writer

In London Fields, Martin Amis gave us the proxy war. In a new play, Jose Zayas gives us the proxy love act. Splayed on the doctor's examining table or crouched as in anticipation of a disaster of a disaster or a birth, the women irr The Wombs of Angel Street, remain willing to wait for miracles.

Experimental theater is risky. The danger lies not so much in the author's decision to stretch the limits of the genre as in the temptation to succumb to the kind of incoherence which is too often confused with depth.

Zayas, aided by excellent acting and production, does well with the form for the most part. The Wombs of Angel Street, though wildly uneven, shows promise in confronting the well-worn but nonetheless complex and clusive themes of birth, sex and death.

The play opens as Gordon, a shy bartender played with candor and sensitivity by Andrew Barth, is writing a personals ad. He is, in the playwright's own words, a "narrator left in the dark." Like Will Self's hermaphroditic Oxford don, Gordon is a postmodern creation. Recently, it has become deceptively easy to label anything vaguely eccentric as postmodern. But The Wombs of Angel Street, with its rejection of cause-effect linearity and its characters' use of subjective imagination to recreate reality, clearly embraces some of the genre's conventions.

In keeping with a fairly recent trend, Zayas has written, in the boradest sense, a mystery play of the postmodern variety. There is no weapon, no body, no discernable motive. But his characters wait for the deus ex machina to intervene and bring salvation in one form or another.

The story's plot centers around the troubled romantic relationships of two sisters, Ellen (Catherine Ingman) and Margo (Margaret J. Barker). Ellen is alone and supposedly pregnant. At the same time, her sister's obsession with her own infertility have soured her marriage and alienated her husband, Antoine (played by Neal Farnsworth).

Reminiscing about his college experiences, Antoine tells his wife nastily, "I miss sodomy." As though driven by a bizarre brand of sitcom Providence, Antoine begins an affair with Magdalena, a teenage prostitute whose unplanned pregnancy eventually drives the plat toward its unsettling conlusion.

Magdelana, played with skillful irony by Bronwen Cowan, moves in with Antoine and Margo. Greedy and deceptive, she becomes both surrogate mother and love object Cornering the older woman, she hisses, "We should talk. After all, I'm the mother of your child."

Margo revoils from the idea of doubt and disillusionment pathetically refusing to admit her own failings. Antoine's description of his wife as "a mermaid without a song," is an interesting revelation, but the character is too annoying and neurotic to arouse much sympathy.

The most compelling character by far is Antoine, played with a great sense of warped humor by Neil Farnsworth. His love is Dionysian, bordering on the pathological. To the women, he becomes a ridiculously undeserving fertility god, a role he ambivalently accepts.

Zayas uses humor to explore some of these themes, with mixed success. The Wombs of Angel Street has some compelling well written dialogue. When his wife chides him for his insensitivity Antoine quips, "Oh great, now I have to start reading for subtext." The scene in which Antoine pours out his heart to the bartender provides another interesting look at the present day confusion over sex roles.

Unfortunately, a few episodes are offensively unfunny. The scene where Antoine pulls a cucumber out of one of Magdalena's hidden orifices as she lies on his examining table is unforgivable. The joke is adolescent at best, a mindless exercise in misogyny at worst, lacking artistic motivation or worth in either case.

Using sexually explicit material is tricky. What may scem refreshingly candid at first, runs the risk of becoming self-indulgent.

The play's climactic scene, in which the three women "give birth," with unexpected results, illustrates this central flaw. Over wrought and suffused with vague religious symbolism, the birth scene simply fails to deliver the promised moment of redemptive "magic."

Though moments like these frustrate the viewer, the last scenes save The Wombs of Angel Street, In his final monologue, Gordon promises that next time, "we won't have any death, any causality, only magic" and provides some poignant musings on the nature of providence and love.

Despite being proudly anarchist in spirit, The Wombs of Angel Street wisely rejects any attempt to demythologize this mystery.