Fiction

Fiction
ACT Theatre; ends Sun., Nov. 14

The trouble with Fiction is that it isn't—fiction, that is. Oh, playwright/director Steven Dietz made most of it up, I assume, but I mean it isn't a novel, it's a play. Yet every clever, crafted line of dialogue that might read great on the page sounds like a clever, crafted line of dialogue that might read great on the page. The tale turns intriguingly, yet the words coming out of everybody's mouths never resemble the way people talk if they don't have chapter headings neatly separating the important episodes in their lives.

Maybe this is what Dietz intended. The two main characters of this three-person play are, in fact—or I guess I should say, in fiction—writers. They're fiction writers. Whatever. Michael (John Procaccino) and Linda Waterman (Suzanne Bouchard) are married authors, and Dietz is using their adroitness for literary imagination as a metaphor to examine the human propensity toward more useful fabrications. The difference between a lie and the truth can be less certain for anyone who recognizes that the one very often informs the other; writers, in particular, thrive on that dubious relationship.

Everybody in Fiction, unfortunately, would sound better in fiction; they're far too prone to launching into ornate reflections that never have the ease of spoken conversation. And they are very into words. When the Watermans find out that Linda has three weeks to live—"like something out of Nabokov," she says—Linda tells Michael that she wants to read his voluminous diaries before she dies. He's a little vain, apparently—"in a truly Tom Wolfe–ian sort of way," we're told—so, after some hedging, he agrees. (If people really talked like the Watermans, life would be very exhausting, in a War and Peace kind of way, if you ask me.) So, Linda reads Michael's diaries and discovers his affair with Abby (Emily Cedergreen), a younger woman he met at a writer's colony, and as the play jumps back and forth in time, the line between what's real and what has a little help from desperate invention continues to blur.

Great idea, but Dietz boxes himself into a corner with bookishness. He gets in some nice licks at the tormented hubris of writers—"No matter what they say, writers don't want to write," Michael tells Emily. "They just want to be writers"—though whenever he tries to break out of wry, pensive reflectiveness and get anyone to come across as colloquial, it's embarrassingly unconvincing. Cedergreen, an attractive actor forced to play an argumentative idea more than a role, has to stand around fuming while Procaccino (doing that fidgety Alan Alda thing that drives me up the wall) seduces her with badinage that wouldn't work on the most predisposed of vixens. Miscast Bouchard, as one of those spirited, sharp-tongued women who always seem to come down with incurable diseases, is made to get up and perform a few lines of Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart" during a casual debate over pop songs. She understandably looks as though she'd rather be anyplace else (warm, poised Bouchard is certainly someone you'd mourn in death, but foul-mouthed force of life is a little beyond her).

Dietz is all plot and not enough flesh and blood here. We don't really know why Michael wouldn't just lie his way out of letting Linda at his diaries—or why he'd even bother with the hostile Abby, for that matter—outside of such things better serving the story at hand. The show is efficient but not particularly theatrical: Its episodes piece together into a unified whole, like in a book, and there's a rather cunning plot twist three-quarters of the way through, like in a book; and if this were all a book, I'd tell you to enjoy it for the ride despite the bumps. But it's not. So I won't. STEVE WIECKING

As You Like It
Center House Theatre; ends Sun., Nov. 14

Artistic Director Stephanie Shine says her As You Like It is inspired by a walk she took around her grandparents' gravesites in Ireland. That may be, but in fact, it has to be the least grave production I've ever seen, and it's too impatient to walk. It's peppy and quick-stepping, like the quip-a-minute badinage in the Thin Man flicks.

As the cross-dressing star of the piece, Rosalind, Deborah Fialkow reminds me of a less butch version of the aviator Suzanne Bouchard played in the Rep's Misalliance—long, lean, and lithe, poised to pounce, sexily feminine yet curvelessly mannish. Which makes it all the easier for her to dress up as a man and slip into the Forest of Arden to educate her intended in the proper way to court her.

Paul Morgan Stetler plays Rosalind's erotic quarry Orlando like a big, dim galoot. He's not bad, but he's no match for Fialkow's more vivid stage presence. Neither is the promising Susan McIntyre, who, as Rosalind's best friend, Celia, is affecting but a bit hesitant. Shine lessens her effect by forcing her to keep up with Fialkow's rat-a-tat delivery. And with Rosalind talking so damn fast, it's tough to care about her, or catch the complex arguments she makes about ideal and real love. More than most Shakespeare plays, this one depends on the audience's awareness of literary romantic and pastoral clichés, and the velocity of Shine's production mooshes everything together: fake shepherd and real shepherd, urbanite and arcadian blur into a blob, like a mob fistfighting in a cartoon.