'Run, Mourner, Run' a riveting tale of rising desperation

In the rock-solid world premiere of Run, Mourner, Run, there are no exits for its poor main character, Dean, a feckless young guy suddenly pitted against the two richest men in a nowhere Southern hamlet.

And there's no exit for you, either, when you watch the play unfold in Flashpoint Theatre Company's production, directed by Matt Pfeiffer with a keen sense of storytelling.

I was riveted as Dean - gay, sullen, lost in his own young-adult wreckage - becomes more hopelessly locked into desperation. Run, Mourner, Run is the work of the hot young playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, and has the mark of his other plays: No matter how alien the plot or the characters in it, you're hooked as you watch the play unfurl and then, perhaps, attempt to resolve itself.

This is the first professional production of a McCraney play in Philadelphia; his trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays, were produced by Princeton's McCarter Theatre and New York's Public Theater in Princeton last year.

Being trapped by coincidence or bad decisions or race or poverty or just about anything is a specialty of McCraney's, and Run, Mourner, Run is as much about isolation as it is about betrayal - or, actually, betrayals.

Dean (a powerfully understated portrayal by Keith J. Conallen) is just another piece of white trash to a rich businessman (Brian McCann) who calls him that. But the businessman sorely needs Dean for a land-grabbing blackmail scheme against the town's wealthy black undertaker (Gerard Joseph), who two-times with guys while his Bible-toting wife (Aimé Kelly) sits home studying verse.

It's great for Flashpoint Theatre, among the city's small and vibrant professional companies, to hook this world premiere by this particular playwright. Flashpoint is not calling the production a "world premiere" out of respect for Yale, where students performed the play in a three-performance run at Yale Cabaret. But respect aside - as well as promises to agents and the like - this production matches, in fact, the standard definition of a world premiere, and is one.

McCraney is African-American, gay, and a Miami inner-city native who turned 30 a few weeks ago with impeccable credentials: He's worked as an actor with British director Peter Brook. As a Yale playwriting student, he was assistant to the late playwright August Wilson. He was at Yale with Thom Weaver, the local set and lighting designer who has just become artistic director of Flashpoint, which got the rights to Run, Mourner, Run through that friendship.

McCraney often writes storybook plays, in which you listen to the narration of a fiction writer even as you watch the actors who deliver that descriptive information make it come alive. Run, Mourner, Run, performed in that style, is an adaptation of a story by Randall Kenan, also a black, gay writer raised in the South.

Flashpoint is giving the play the premiere it deserves, packing a tremendous punch into McCraney's script, in an intermissionless hour. An hour well spent.