Pretension sinks a nice little play

Honor and the River

, onstage at the Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 3, is a sweet little one-act about coming of age at a boys' boarding school. Unfortunately, its playwright, Anton Dudley, didn't see it that way.

Dudley stretches the piece into a two-hour-and-40-minute opus in which no water metaphor is left unused, and every thought that occurs to its quivering protagonist Eliot (University of the Arts senior Nicholas Park) is given equally pompous weight. Eliot's soliloquies compose a continuing stream (Just watch, I can do it too!) of contraction-free narration - "I feel sick, as if I will vomit" - kept just barely afloat by earnestness, drollery, and Park's sweetly vulnerable performance. But just barely.

Written with all the subtlety of an actual boarding school student's attempt at playwriting, Honor and the River's title that tells all you need to know about its plot. Quite literally, it's about a kid named Honor (Kevin Duffin) - a prodigal son and the mostly unwilling object of Eliot's clumsy affections - so unworthy of his weighty name that his friends instead call him "Onno." And, well, it's also about a river, specifically the river on which Eliot and Honor spend most afternoons fretting and arguing during the fictional Masterson Academy's crew practice.

Duffin doesn't help matters. He's physically wrong for the part (Eliot complains early on, "Your arms are so much bigger than me" - but Duffin's arms are actually thinner and less defined than Park's). And director Tom Reing allows him to stagger through his monologues with enough unwarranted pauses to make William Shatner jealous.

Ellen Tobie as Eliot's mother, Wawa - Splash! Another liquid metaphor - is, thankfully, the driest thing about the production. Sent from the Mothers of Gay Sons Department at central casting, Tobie turns an icy cheek to most of Eliot's efforts to connect, but not before skillfully lobbing an undeniable bon mot. But under Reing's direction, Paul Nolan as Honor's father, Alcestis, is too steadfast and humble. He is neither captain of finance, nor treading water on his own submerged familial ship.

Of course, the play is about little-h honor, too - between friends, between parents and children (even when half of said parents are dead), and between teammates. Without all the bloated narrative, mythological analogies, J. Dominic Chacon's leaky lighting design, and Robert Kramer's time-devouring set design - which requires the continual raising, lowering, swiveling, buckling and unbuckling of a rowing shell suspended center-stage - there's a not-half-bad story at the play's core. But that treasure is buried fathoms beneath Dudley's self-indulgent descriptions of things like dolphin-father spirit-guides and "January thoughts." The crew might be willing, but the cargo is hardly worth their efforts. Too bad Dudley didn't unload more unnecessary ballast before launching this unsteady vessel.

Theater Review

Honor and the River

Walnut Street Theatre, Independence Studio on 3;

825 Walnut St. Through Sunday, March 15. $30. 215-574-3550. www.WalnutStreetTheatre.org.