February 26 2003

THE SETTING FOR Gary Leon Hill's 8 Bob Off consists of a nearly empty room, bare walls primed for painting, a refrigerator cooling beer in the corner, a cassette player, dust, and some odds and ends. Later a claw-foot tub passes through, followed by a stack of Sheetrock. It's not a house as much as it is a construction zone. But it's more than that, too. One of the two doorways at the back defies the usual rectangle and instead abruptly leans in from the sides. This expressionistic anomaly in John Mayne's otherwise naturalistic design gives a particular sense of imbalance to the entire structure. Like the mocking lines of a fun house, it feels unsound mentally as well as physically. Add to this Jim Cave's lighting, which every now and again dissolves the seemingly solid wall into a scrim with human images beyond it, and you get a neat picture of the protagonist's haunted psyche and ramshackle life.

The "bob-off" of the play's title, alluding to builders' slang for something out of balance ("plumb-off"), already equates Bob Plum (Howard Swain) with the rental property he's working on for his Aunt Edith. A 45-year-old drifter with nothing but long-distance relationships, including a son he rarely sees and a girlfriend who won't return his calls, he's a frustrated Mr. Fix-It, daunted by a task beyond his ken. "I can't do this," he mutters while searching the wall for plumbing, and we understand he means both the house repairs and sorting out his life. Houses are time capsules, after all. What home owner hasn't dredged his or her own soul as the price for remodeling the bathroom? To tear away years of wallpapering is to travel back in time. But without any firm foothold in the present, Bob's plumbing of the past remains disorienting and the future a paralyzing prospect. Unbidden flashbacks substitute for the former, puerile fantasies scribbled in a notebook for the latter.

Enter next-door neighbor Donna (O-Lan Jones), on her artificial leg (her foundation is shaky too), looking for discarded beer bottles. Donna and her boyfriend Bobby (Luis Saguar), unemployed and behind on their rent, occupy the other rental property owned by Aunt Edith. Donna and Bob begin a strange flirtation that includes Donna assuming the roles of Bob's ex-lovers in replays of failed relationships. These occur first as hallucinations on Bob's part but later as an act of charity on Donna's. "We are none of us discrete human beings, Bob," she tells him. "There's overlap, face it." Indeed, Donna has her own ghosts to exorcise, and Bob will return the favor. Bobby, meanwhile, worries if Donna loves him and begins casing Bob's place. Bob acts superior to him, partly as a rival for Donna, but perhaps also to exaggerate the minuscule difference between their situations (a fact underscored by the similarity in their names). Not only do they have more in common than either would like to admit, they need each other, too. In the end, each of these three misfits will help put the other's house in order.

Playwright Hill's partly autobiographical work gets a boost from three seasoned performers under David Dower's able direction. Jones brings a bold, sassy exuberance to Donna, a working-class gal's gal with progressively more broken parts (collarbone, arm) but an indomitable spirit. Saguar's Bobby projects an intelligence and frailty behind the comic malapropisms of a misleadingly simple ex-con. And Swain, the lead in Magic Theatre's 1995 production of Hill's Say Grace, looks at home in the role of Bob, his disheveled mop of graying hair suggesting an overgrown '60s kid only half managing a competing assortment of fears and desires beneath the veneer of a cocky loner. The play's drawbacks run from some forced humor (including uninspired sight gags and offstage pratfalls) to an ending that feels, oddly, both too neatly packaged and only half finished. But director David Dower, another Say Grace veteran, handles his actors with a quiet assurance that gives his agile cast plenty of room to stretch.