"Chester Bailey" at ACT

This is a difficult play. Simple, on the one hand, with only two characters, but complex in a number of ways.

Summary

The blurb on the website covers it pretty well: Dan Clegg plays Chester Bailey, a young man severely injured in an industrial incident during the waning days of WWII. He already feels pretty guilty about not serving in the military, so he has constructed an elaborate denial of the severity of his injuries. David Strathairn plays the doctor assigned to his case, trying to unscramble what's going on with Bailey while also dealing with his personal issues.

This is a new play, and I believe a world premiere, on a limited special run at ACT's Strand Theater.

Strong Casting

This is a case where we know all the actors pretty well. Clegg is young, but well established in the Bay Area in recent years with impressive turns in "Tribes" at Berkeley Rep and "Major Barbara" at ACT along with numerous roles at CalShakes. And Strathairn is a pretty big star in his own right, on both stage and screen (big and small). So expectations are pretty high.

Clegg comes out strong from the start, as a kind of likable and brash kind from New York dealing with not joining up for the war effort because his mother doesn't want him to. So his father gets him a job at the Brooklyn naval yard, which will eventually be the site of his disabling.

Good and Bad

There are good and bad elements right from the start. Sitting in the audience, looking at the stage, it's quite a striking set (designed by Nina Ball, wonderfully creative as usual). It's a believably spartan hospital of the mid-1940s.

Both characters start off by giving their back stories to us, but in a rather disjointed way that is a little off-putting. My mind was immediately taken back to the ships-in-the-night romance of "The Last Five Years" I saw last week at ACT. But soon enough the characters meet up and interact, and all is fine after that.

Truthfully, much of Strathairn's character's early narration seems a bit pointless. It all eventually ties in, but you spend a fair amount of the early scenes wondering why the heck he's telling you some of this stuff. Bailey, on the other hand, wanders a bit, but that just seems to be his character, where Strathairn's Doctor Cotton strikes one as much more straight-ahead, so the meanderings of his speeches are curious.

This is magnified somewhat by Chester's quite direct way of speaking, versus the doctor's rather halting and hesitant manner. While we initially took the doctor's manner to be a character affect, we later decided that Strathairn was having some difficulty with the lines. Having seen him previously, and in more demanding roles, this seems odd to me. On the other hand, this is a short run of a new play, and maybe he just isn't comfortable in the role. There were definitely fumbled lines later, and it seemed apparent that he was aware that some of it wasn't working. Again, not what I expect from an actor of his caliber.

Fascinating Material

There's plenty I could say about the subject matter of the play. It really boils down to an investigation of the stories we all tell ourselves about our lives: what happened and why, and sometimes just as importantly what didn't, and why not. Bailey's case is rather an extreme one: he's in denial about his blindness and his amputated hands, but the doctor's life involves some fictions that are in many ways just as critical.

It's not always brilliantly handled, but there are some very good twists and turns to the plot as we eventually learn much more about everyone involved. And at the end, we circle around and ask ourselves just how reliable these characters really are at all. So there's a lot to chew on.

Ultimately...

Well worth seeing. The intimacy of the Strand theater works well for a play of this scope. It rather makes me wish they had staged "The Last Five Years" there as well, as I think that show could have used a bit more connection to the audience, and less physical separation between its two characters on the large Geary Theater stage.

Anyway, for a show that is relying on star power to draw people in, I thought this came up a little short. But the play itself is pretty strong, and I think with a bit more work it could be quite interesting.