The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 27

27" THE BOSTON GLOBE FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1993 Backstage Raising the curtain on race, ethnicity 4 By Patti Hartigan GLOBE STAFF i i i Henry Hwang's "Face Value," a comedy that jumps off from the brouhaha over the casting of Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian in "Miss Saigon." It opens a pre-Broadway tryout at the Colonial Theatre on Feb. 9. The New Repertory Theatre in Newton is presenting the area premiere of Athol Fu-gard's "My Children! My Africa!" which runs Feb. 25-April 4. PHOTO RALPH NELSON Nancy Travis and Kiefer Sutherland in a scene from "The Vanishing." Credibility is missing from 'The Vanishing' By Jay Carr GLOBE STAFF "The Vanishing" is a rarity a Hollywood remake of a European original by the same director, in this MnviP case Holland's IHUVie George Sluizer.

Review The original The Charlestown Working Theater has been dark for more than two years now, but it's reopening later this month, depending on the Boston Gas Company strike. A sister team, Kristin and Jennifer Johnson, approached the board of directors last summer to discuss revitalizing the 99-seat space in the old Charlestown Firehouse. After a successful fund-raiser and with the support of Boston Arts Commissioner Bruce Rossley, the team is opening the theater as a rental space, with plans to -present their own work later on down the road. They're also in the process of reviving the theater's program for children. BUT.

They haven't been able to get the utility company to turn on the gas, so things are up in the air. The first production by Cicatrix Theater Company is set for Feb. 18. "We hope they go off strike so we can get the gas turned on," Kristin Johnson said. "But if they don't we'll have to reschedule." Stay tuned.

about a man hunt while Walcott teaches at Boston University, many of his plays haven't been seen here. He's currently working to bring the Trinidad Theater Workshop to the University Playwrights' Theatre, which he runs at BU. "You can't separate my plays from the Trinidad Workshop," Walcott said the other day. It's all still tentative, but Walcott and company are trying to set up a benefit performance for an arts center in St. Lucia, where Walcott was born, on April 7 at a downtown location.

If all goes as planned, the Trinidad Workshop will perform Walcott's plays at BU April 8-10. Meanwhile, a slate of other works will contribute to a kaleidoscope of cultures on area stages. El Teatro Campesino is the seminal Latino theater founded by Luis Valdez in 1965 to express the concerns of Mexican-Americans. The California-based troupe is embarking on its first tour in more than a decade and will be at MIT's Kresge Auditorium on Feb. 19.

The troupe will present "Simply Maria" by Jose-fina Lopez and "How Else Am I Supposed to Know that I'm Still Alive" by Evelina Fernandez. The production is sponsored by MIT's Mexican-American association, La Union Chicana por Aztlan. The New World Theater at U-MassAmherst was founded in 1979 to celebrate and present dramatic work by people of color. Its upcoming season features a healthy mix: Tonight and tomorrow, "Miss Ida B. Wells," a play about an African-American journalist in the 1800s written by Endesha Ida Mae Holland; Feb.

19-20, Porno Afro Homos, the extraordinary San Francisco trio that explores issues concerning gay black men; Feb. 25-26, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," by August Wilson; April 3, "Reverb-ber-ber-rations," a theatrical ritual by the Native American troupe Spiderwoman Theater; and "Tokyo Bound," an exploration of cultural identity by Asian-American performer Amy Hill. On the local front, there's David In these changing times, the theater sometimes seems painfully irrelevant A bunch of people who all look alike sit in a dark room watching actors perform, say, "The Cock- tail Party in the Dining Room." Meanwhile, back in South Central Los Angeles But Act II of the current season offers a mix of projects that probe contemporary issues and reflect the changing racial and ethnic landscape of the nation. To begin, New York writer Robbie McCauley has created a piece that explores the implications of the 1974 court order to desegregate Boston's public schools. McCauley, who won an Obie and a Bessie Award for her play "Sally's Rape," has been working with 10 local actors from different racial and economic bak- grounds for the past year.

Using a documentary technique similar to that of Anna Deavere Smith, the ac-tors went into various neighbor- hoods to collect stories. Together, they created a collage of tales that aim to celebrate and challenge atti- tudes about cultural difference. The piece is part of a trio of works about race relations that is being produced by The Arts Company in Cambridge. The first piece, "Mississippi Freedom," explored the voting-rights struggle in the 1960s. "Turf will be performed March 5-6 at the Boston Center for the Arts; March 12-13 at the recently reopened Charlestown Working Theater (more on that later); March 18-19 at the Strand Theater, and March 26-27 at the South Boston Boys and Girls Club.

Most people know Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott for his poetic oeuvre, but he's also been part of a movement to create an indigenous theater in his native West Indies. He founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop 18 years ago and has written allegorical plays that explore issues of colonialism and cultural identity. But ing obsessively for the woman in his life, who was kidnapped from a roadside mini-mart was mordant, disorienting, claustrophobic and more than a little perverse. The suspense in this new reincarnation more a reworking than a remake lies in watching Sluizer try to protect the qualities of his original from big Hollywood studio imperatives. Ultimately, he fails.

The amazing thing, though, is that he's able to keep it comes close to destroying the new relationship in his life. As the new love interest, Nancy Travis is terrif- ic, taking the least interesting, least defined character and turning her into a strong and altogether appeal- ing young contemporary woman with some endearing fight in her. The problem is that there's no 5: way Hollywood is going to let Sluizer wander unmolested down the same ji; byways he explored in his Ambiguity is not a thing Hollywood prizes, which means that while Sluizer can make his characters more vivid and individualized than -most, he's unable to avoid the rigid good-guy, bad-guy divisions so dear, to studios' hearts. He certainly gets the most out of his material a scene1, in which Bridges, flattened against i wall behind a door, lies in wait for Travis is as suspenseful as any so far this year. But there's also no getting around the fact that Sluizer's materv al is compromised.

One of the unset tling things about "The Vanishing" the first time around was its casual -assumption that morality is no match for obsessiveness especially when it's hooked to shaky male egos. This "Vanishing," backing away from moral absurdity, backs away from credibility, too. The best thing in it is the sight of Travis scrunching up her eyebrows, wondering whether to dump Sutherland or push on with him. THE VANISHING Directed by: George Sluizer Screenplay by: Todd Graff (navel Tim Kmbbe) Starring: Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Nancy Travis, Sandra Bidlock, Park OveraR, Maggie Linderman, Lisa Ekhhorn, George Hearn Playing at: Cheri, suburbs Rated: (terror, violence, language) with her. The story has been moved to the Pacific Northwest, and its grays suit the grave clarity with which it's all played out, as Bridges grows more unhinged and his intelligence severs any last ties with morality.

He feels obliged to lock horns with Kiefer Sutherland, the young woman's fiance, who has never stopped circulating reward posters and appearing on television to appeal for information several years after the event. Otherwise, the reconstituted is a pretty banal proposition. It's the old story. Hollywood hires Sluizer for the strangeness and originality of his work, then works to dilute it at every turn. Still, he's a good enough director to get interest-ingly detailed performances from his leads.

Until he's sunk by the ending, Bridges is hypnotically chilling as a man immersed in madness. Sutherland strikes the right note as the none-too-bright bereft lover who doesn't think things through and afloat as long as he does before the predictable studio-dictated cop-out. At its center is Jeff Bridges, a chemistry prof who sees himself as a neo-Raskolnikov. He's rational on the outside, a raging sociopath on the inside, with a far from healthy focus on his teen-age daughter -played with just the right hint of eerie deviance by Maggie Linderman. When he's acclaimed as a hero after rescuing a drowning child, he feels he has to go the other way and test his capacity for evil.

This involves inveigling a young woman into his car, chloroforming her and driving off Speak the speech, I pray you. The English-Speaking Union, a national organization founded in 1920 to promote cultural understanding through the use of the English language, sponsors an annual Shakespeare Contest for high school students. The Boston-area finals will be held Sunday at 11 a.m. at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. The winner goes on to the national competition in New York.

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