A Mixed-Up One-Man 'World'

The lone character in Chris Stezin's "This Perfect World" is a bit of a basket case, and he seems to know it.

"Remembering through the dark waters of perception" is how Alan, the shell-shocked subject of this hour-long monologue, describes his mission. Wandering amid what looks like post-storm debris on the tiny stage at Arlington's Theatre on the Run, Alan says to the audience, "That's what I'm trying to do here -- make sense."

He doesn't always do it, despite the methodical, unfussy production by Charter Theatre (a specialist in new local plays, with Stezin as a company member). Actor Jason Lott looks slightly alarmed as a man who doesn't quite seem competent to be out on his own, but Alan slips in and out of lucidity in sometimes implausible ways. Coupled with a mean streak of post-9/11 xenophobia, this character study is a mashup of psychological puzzles and outright lies that you're not terribly compelled to solve.

Not that Stezin doesn't arrange Alan's confessions with care, and even with a little grim poetry. The waters of Lake Erie are rising, Alan awakens in a flood, he's in New York on 9/11 -- vivid but often fantastical and contradictory disaster imagery piles up, accounting for the soft-spoken style with quick-flaring intensity that Lott uses to tell the tale.

So what really happened? Did Alan lose a wife and child? Did he rescue his daughter from choking? What -- this fired insurance worker is a pilot? For sure, he lashed out at an Iraqi American who was filming the insurance building where Alan worked, setting up an ongoing personal conflict potentially rich with political overtones.

That skirmish does indeed generate some disquieting confessions, yet it doesn't fully tap into the vein of fractured identity and irrepressible hostility that Stezin seems to be stalking. Facts and fictions eventually get sorted out, but it's hard to connect Alan to anything larger than the unhappy and sometimes ugly patterns in his own head.

The impressive part of the show is how cogently Lott and director John Vreeke chart those patterns. Lott's an engaging performer who makes it easy for Alan to slip into the voices of other people he tells us about -- Alan's sister, a drunk woman who mistakenly dials him in the wee hours, the Iraqi man. The actor's storytelling has understated drive, and he is nicely attuned to the bits of comic relief; it's not a humorless play.

But the drama is a little too gnomic for its own good. "Living is a straight line," Alan says in one of his many unlikely, writerly pronouncements, "but remembering is a kaleidoscope." The play is indeed a restlessly turning kaleidoscope, but at least the performance is a nifty straight line.

This Perfect World, by Chris Stezin. Directed by John Vreeke. Set design, Keith Bridges; lights, Klyph Stanford. Through Oct. 12 at Theatre on the Run, 3700 S. Four Mile Run Dr., Arlington. Call 202-333-7009 or visit http://www.chartertheatre.org.