Fine acting in contrived play, 'Touch,' by No Rules Theatre

By Celia Wren
Sunday, February 13, 2011

People can seem as remote as stars in the world of the astronomy-themed drama "Touch." Now on view in a terrifically acted production mounted by No Rules Theatre, Toni Press-Coffman's studied, heartstring-tugging play centers on Kyle, a geeky astronomer who lucks into a happy marriage. After his wife mysteriously disappears, Kyle finds human connection as impossible as the prospect of reaching out to grab Betelgeuse.

If this personal-celestial analogy sounds a little too tidy, well, Press-Coffman's 1999 script is full of such convenient resonances. Kyle just happens to be obsessed by John Keats, the romantic poet who wrote more than one ringing line about stargazing and whose lyrics ponder life's intermingling of pain and ecstasy, mutability and permanence, dark and light.

There's more! Kyle's quirky wife Zoe just happens to have been a fan of astrology - not astronomy - and prodded her husband to make room for spirituality in his materialist worldview.

It all feels pretty contrived, but director Joshua Morgan's eloquently spare production almost makes you suspend disbelief. The bulk of the credit goes to Matthew Meixler, who is unerringly natural and affecting as the now bewildered, now enraged, now nostalgic Kyle.

Youthfully dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, his five o'clock shadow intensifying his harried look, the actor launches the play with a marathon monologue recalling Kyle and Zoe's first meeting, courtship, honeymoon and all-too-brief domestic bliss. The sequence goes on and on, but it's never physically static. And Meixler's Kyle is so alive - so rapt as he relives his romance but so obviously repressing pain - that the urge to check your watch registers only now and then.

The performance gains intensity from composer James Stewart's shivery electronic music and from the intimacy of the H Street Playhouse space, which has been given thematically apt environmental treatment by set designer Hannah J. Crowell. White dots and dustings on the blue floor evoke the night sky, and light bulbs with glowing filaments form a low-slung constellation over the stage, emphasizing the idea that humanity is dwarfed by the cosmos. To underscore the theme of human disconnection, the audience sits on opposite sides of the performance area, which is bare except for geometric configurations resembling chair-size fragments of a deconstructed Rubik's Cube.

After Meixler has heroically held forth in these surroundings for a good long while, the play's three other characters materialize to advance "Touch's" chronicle of loss, denial and healing. Brandon McCoy is compelling as Kyle's pragmatic best friend Bennie; Sarah Strasser deftly raises and lowers the defenses of Zoe's tightly wound sister Serena; and Lisa Hodsoll is a refreshingly fierce, brassy presence as the cynical prostitute Kathleen. (Ren LaDassor designed the costumes, including Kathleen's blue-green minidress, boots and leather jacket.)

The performances are perhaps all the more assured thanks to the production's run last month in Winston-Salem, N.C. (No Rules, now in its second season, is presenting its work in that city as well as here.) Alas, even the fine acting can't camouflage the conspicuous rigging of the play's denouement, which strains for triumph-of-the-human-spirit uplift. Keats made the point with much more grace and persuasiveness when he wrote, "Aye on the shores of darkness there is light."

Touch by Toni Press-Coffman. Directed by Joshua Morgan; lighting design, Rob Ross; sound, Elisheba Ittoop; assistant director, Dani Sanger Stoller; assistant sound designer, Patrick Calhoun. 100 minutes.