Spars and Scars

By T.E. Kalem

THE SEA HORSE

by JAMES IRWIN

Big, fat, frumpy Gert is as disconcertingly direct as the belaying pin with which she flattens obstreperous patrons of her waterfront bar. If one of the seamen who frequent her place takes her sexual fancy, she issues a pointblank invitation to him to follow her upstairs. In recent months she has limited her favors to a virile ship's engineer named Harry, who possesses an unholy thirst and an unquenchable lust. Harry (Edward J. Moore) is as lean as Jack Sprat, and he and Gert (Conchata Ferrell) form the oddly discrepant, frantically energetic alliance of a harbor tug docking an ocean liner.

On this particular shore leave Harry has undergone a sea change, and out of that change and its effects 38-year-old "James Irwin" (actually Edward J. Moore under a pseudonym) has fashioned a first play that is robust, touching, funny and nakedly honest. The Sea Horse divides neatly into two parts that might be subtitled "Spar and Tell." The first act is a land of sexual scrimmage with earthy roughhousing on Gert's part and some wild and woozy comic foolery on Harry's. The tone is that of a mating between Steinbeck and Saroyan.

Act II is an emotional landfall with the two characters no longer fencing defensively but confessing their past scars, present fears and future hopes. The reason this is so affecting lies in the consummate skill and total humanity with which Moore and Ferrell in fuse their roles.

When Harry attempts to articulate a thought, he chokes on it like a fish bone. But he finally blurts out his heart's desire. He wants to marry Gert and have kids. This puts Gert into a sullen, belligerent funk. She laughs at Harry. He cannot bear to be laughed at. She can not bear to be wanted, needed and loved.

Brutalized in an early marriage, she has cultivated her fat as protective armor so as never to be wanted again. Though neither of them could begin to say it, they are spent with running from the vicious foxhounds of the world. They are both seeking the peace and safety that Blanche DuBois called "a cleft in the rock of the world," and at play's end they seem to have found it.

For the Circle Repertory Theater Co., The Sea Horse is the third small triumph in a row, following the still-running When You Comin' Back Red Ryder? and The Hot I Baltimore. In the past couple of seasons C.R.T.C. has be come the most fecund off-off-Broadway group. Each of these productions made a successful transition to off-Broadway, a dramatic terrain that no longer bustles with the creative vitality it once had.

The C.R.T.C. group is drawn to plays about people who have been badly bruised by life but are buoyed up by a resilient humor and a spunky refusal to admit defeat. In directing The Sea Horse, Marshall W. Mason is as true to that theme as a plumbline.

--T.E. Kalem

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