Of Drugs, Porn And Soup

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: ESCAPE FROM HAPPINESS

AUTHOR: GEORGE F. WALKER

WHERE: CENTER STAGE, BALTIMORE

THE BOTTOM LINE: An unsung but first-rank regional stage scores with vibrant absurdism about a bonkers family.

Baltimore is no one's idea of an artistic Mecca -- maybe the last top-tier cultural icon to emerge there was Babe Ruth -- but for 30 seasons it has fostered a nonprofit theater of increasingly venturesome repertoire. Housed in a converted college building amid the rundown brick facades of downtown, Center Stage has debuted Eric Overmyer's On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning, a sprightly fantasy about three Victorian women explorers that became one of the most widely produced plays of the '80s; David Feldshuh's Miss Evers' Boys, a drama about government experiments on black victims of syphilis that was a 1992 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama; and Overmyer's The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin, a musing on the turn-of-the-century black composer and an unknown peer that arrives off- Broadway this week. The company's longtime artistic director, Stan Wojewodski Jr., moved up to Yale two years ago as dean of the drama school and artistic director of the prestigious Yale Rep.

Wojewodski's successor, Irene Lewis, demonstrates her own facility for nurturing new work in Escape from Happiness, a high-energy absurdist comedy about a nutty blue-collar family entangled with drug dealing, pornography, police corruption and an overabundance of soup. The play is at Center Stage through March 14, then moves on to Yale, which is co-producing the show.

The first half of the action is dominated by Lois Smith as the family's beleaguered matriarch, a woman whose rambling talk can disarm a felon through sheer boredom. The second half is dominated by Pippa Pearthree as the most successful of the clan's three adult daughters, a lesbian lawyer with a taste for vengeance and violence. There are also plenty of laughs for Alexandra Gersten as a daughter forever finding herself, William Youmans as a good- natured but doltish son-in-law prone to getting beaten up (he does an exquisite ballet of pain as an arm in a sling gets wrenched anew) and Jack Wallace as a veteran cop full of salty scorn for anything he cannot understand. The opening act is a fast 90 minutes of wit and surprise; the shorter second act eventually winds down into wearying explication and mawkish reconciliation, yet a saving vitality lingers.

The play is the 20th by George F. Walker, one of Canada's leading writers yet largely unknown in the U.S. -- although his Beautiful City, part of a trilogy touching on the same family, has just finished a run in Chicago, and Nothing Sacred, an adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, had a splendid production starring Tom Hulce at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum in 1988. Walker's work certainly travels. Although Escape was originally set in Toronto, Lewis' staging makes it feel entirely American, from the opening moment, when a battered TV onstage starts blaring The Donna Reed Show, to the snarling climax, when at least four people are pointing weapons at one another.

The gap between media imagery and reality seems an inescapable theme in contemporary family comedy. It is a measure of Walker's craft, however, that this topic remains incidental, while the deeper humor arises from the nature of family itself -- the vast yet believable diversity within a single clan, and the infinite capacity both to deplore and to embrace one another.