If you go
“The Constellation”
Where: Joe’s Movement Emporium, 3309 Bunker Hill Road, Mount Rainier
When: Through Feb. 14
Info: $20, $10 for students and seniors; activecultures.org; 301-526-9911. Performance time is approximately 75 minutes without intermission.
There’s a love triangle at the center of “The Constellation,” a new comic fable from local dramatist Gwydion Suilebhan. But the lady with the suitors isn’t the type to keep her affections to one man. She doesn’t espouse free love, but freedom, certainly. And not to cast aspersions, but she’s got this thing for sailors. Yeah, so “The Constellation” of the title is the USS Constellation, the 155-year-old sloop-of-war that intercepted three slave ships just before the start of the Civil War. Since 1963, she’s been moored in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor as a National Historic Landmark — an unworthy end, the play seems to suggest, for so proud and righteous a warrior.
Suilebhan has said he thinks of the ship, one of the last sail-powered vessels the U.S. Navy built, as the troubled city’s soul, but this isn’t “The Wire.” It’s just a sweet, slight tale of a lopsided struggle for control of the old girl’s destiny. Active Cultures the company behind it, specializes in locally themed productions, and Suilebhan has lovingly peppered his mash note with Charm City references and jokes. (Sorry, Dundalk.)
He presents his characters, by contrast, as archetypes: Man, Woman, Tour Guide, Boss. Fairy tales need memorable villains, and even with the name “Boss,” Bethany Hoffman’s BlackBerry-and-Starbucks-slinging MBA-type, is pretty generically sketched. She earns some laughs teetering across the gangplank of David Ghatan’s set in her corporate pumps, though.
Scheming to further defame the Constellation by hosting happy hours and worse, Hoffman’s character charges her overzealous employee (a chirpy Ben Kingsland) with setting up a ghost tour. But avoid the gruesome tales of pulling corpses and the starving, moaning wounded from the creaking hulls of defeated slave transports, she warns him. Keep it cute.
“People usually say ‘cute’ when they mean ‘stupid’ and ‘pointless’,” Kingsland protests.
“Cute is delightful!” Boss snaps back.
Jason Mcintosh — a versatile actor too often typecast because of his beefy build and imposing voice — gives a moving performance as an indigent man who shimmys in through the ship’s gunports to sleep at night, and dreams of restoring her former glory as a liberator on the high seas. He’s got what he sees as a good thing going back on dry land with a fellow indigent played by Lolita-Marie, who pulls off the evening’s most impressive trick, imbuing her shrill, obstinate character with dimension and vulnerability.
Director Jessica Burgess and her cast have mined Suilebhan’s brief, gentle curio for grit and consequence enough for us to invest in it, while preserving enough of an air of fantasy that the inevitable aftermath of its climactic scene isn’t a crushing bummer. For that, Baltimore, David Simon’s got you covered.
