Arts Review

Chesapeake

The Hideout Theatre, 617 Congress, 474-8497

www.paladintheatrecompany.com

Through April 23

Running time: 2 hr.

In Lee Blessing's Chesapeake, a man becomes a dog and lives to tell the tale. Paladin Theatre Company gives the play its Austin premiere, with Charles P. Stites directing himself as the man and sole character, Kerr, a performance artist who

receives a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and gives a performance of the Bible's Song of Solomon as the audience slowly disrobes him. A conservative politician, Thurm Pooley, uses Kerr's federally funded biblical blasphemy as a tool in a successful run for the Senate, and Kerr attempts revenge by kidnapping the senator's dog, Lucky, a Chesapeake Bay retriever with an affinity for photo ops, and filming the whole thing as a documentary.

Stites takes on the nearly two hours of text and, for the most part, makes it look like a romp in the park. He has great passion for the material, and it shows in the energy with which he approaches it and the precision with which he delivers it. Any actor who takes on the task of giving voices to a half-dozen characters in some two hours of stage time deserves exceeding credit, and if Stites stumbles on occasion, as practically any actor would, such slight flaws show the gem of a finely crafted performance.

The staging proves somewhat problematic. Stites uses a chair at various points, and he keeps the chair in the upper-left corner of the otherwise bare stage, along with three bottles of water, only one of which he uses. Given the simplicity of the production – there's really nothing of note on the stage except for Stites, the chair, and the bottles of water – having anything extra tends not only to draw focus but to raise questions that might have nothing to do with the story at hand. For instance: What are those two extra bottles of water for? Stites also uses the walls of the theatre throughout but probably would have been better off if he didn't, as the staging surrounding the use of the walls seems forced, and if the staging seems forced, the story most likely will feel that way as well.

But it doesn't most of the time, and again, most of the credit must go to Stites as an actor. He makes interesting choices, so he keeps the material interesting even when it isn't necessarily. On a certain level, Blessing's structure is a wonder, piling metaphor upon metaphor as we watch Stites playing Kerr, who is playing himself playing a dog. Still, something about the script bothers me. While Blessing's story is about many things – inspiration, finding yourself, politics, friendship, the futility of revenge – it's mostly about what it means to be an artist, a favorite topic of artists throughout the ages and possibly a self-serving one. Stites was smart to cast himself in the role as he ends up offering a performance that might be even better than the play that Blessing wrote.