'Row After Row' at People's Light: Fighting battles past and present

Here's the quick review of People's Light and Theatre Company's local premiere of Row After Row: Jessica Dickey's imaginative play uses a unique subculture to probe fascinating ideas in what is ultimately a flawed and incomplete attempt.

And given the play's 70-minute length, even that sentence probably is too much.

Dickey's play hops between two events: Pickett's Charge, the foolhardy Confederate gambit during the Battle of Gettysburg, and that same stratagem staged by Civil War reenactors in the present.

It starts at a pub after the reenactment. Leah (Teri Lamm) unwittingly claims the regular table of Cal (William Zielinski) and Tom (Kevin Bergen), two Gettysburg natives, childhood best friends, and longtime re-enactors.

While Cal berates Leah for lack of authenticity (she wore a nose ring during battle) and praises himself and Tom as "Sentinels of the Legacy," she rails about the exclusive nature of their battlefield boys' club.

It's funny, if annoyingly phrased in cheap comebacks of a sophomore debate ("history is just that, 'his-story' "). But where accuracy is concerned, that's the way you'd expect three moderately well-educated adults to talk about important issues.

Christopher Colucci's eerie musical interludes bring the action back to 1863, when Zielinski plays Gen. James Longstreet, Bergen a deserter, and Lamm a soldier.

In its barroom scenes, the play asks politically potent questions about gender, class, and veracity; by crisscrossing past and present, it raises more intriguing philosophical issues about whether history provides analogs and answers or only functions as a mirror onto which we project our own era's beliefs, personalities, and neuroses. All three actors help elucidate this latter theme, with Bergen in particular delivering a touching performance in both eras as a pacifist who has no place in history books filled with conflict.

But as Dickey tries to jump from one big idea to the next, the play briefly loses its thread, shifting back to the present in a manner that suggests a missing scene occurred, allowing the characters to move past one conflict without resolving it. And by the time she introduces a third, even larger existential theme involving identity and meaning . . . well, she wants too much in far too short a piece for it to satisfy, let alone resolve, any of the big issues she confronts.

Row After Row

Through Nov. 9 at People's Light and Theatre Company, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern

Tickets: $27-$47

Information: 610-644-3500 or www.peopleslight.org

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