'Losing the Shore': A '50s journey on choppy seas

At first, BCKSEET's

Losing the Shore,

by local playwright Catherine Rush, looks like a bad Noël Coward play. It's the Fifties, we're on an elegant ocean liner where rich, clever people wear tuxedos and gowns, toss drinks in each other's faces in fits of pique, and everybody talks in quippy aphorisms - only here they sound like bumper stickers ("I have a penchant for metaphor" and "No one likes to live in the abyss of the unknown"). They use words like

wench

,

wretch

, and

beguiling

.

The middle-aged lovers are Adlai Stevenson (Michael Byrne, who creates an oddly effeminate Stevenson), who has just lost the presidential election to Dwight Eisenhower, and Alicia Patterson Guggenheim (Catherine Palfenier), a prominent journalist playing hooky from her husband. Joining them are two young women, the devout Ruth (Megan Slater), whose father owns the shipping line, and her friend Hortense (Kate Brennan), who is deeply withdrawn for reasons we will discover later and that will turn out to be deeply uninteresting.

Fifth wheel is spoiled brat Stuyvesant (Nathan Edmonson), who is abrasive beyond bearing, but that attitude will turn out to be caused by his advanced diabetes (first I've heard that this disease makes people obnoxious).

All the characters will change entirely into unrecognizable others by Act Two: Hortense will become flirty, jolly, and wildly helpful; Ruth will become mischievous and funny and courageous; and Stuyvesant will suddenly turn sweet and grateful (although now annoying in new ways, quoting William Blake and going on and on about sunsets).

The plot, oddly enough, revolves around Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's 1953 executions related to espionage. Whether this play has something to say about history, or current events, or politics remains unclear.

There is one hideous moment when Stevenson asks Ruth about earthquake drills, since she has just graduated from the University of California Berkeley as an English major (despite being, apparently, so severely dyslexic as to be unable to read). He then reads the draft of a speech he is about to make about the uses of atomic energy and how "nature is neutral." Given recent events in Japan - which, of course, the playwright could not have known about - these lines should have been unspeakable.

Directed by Andrew Borthwick-Leslie, with an emphasis on furniture coming and going in scene after scene, Losing the Shore seems to lose its way over and over.

Play overboard!

Presented by BCKSEET Productions, Upstairs at the Adrienne, Adrienne Theater, 2030 Sansom St. Through April 2. Tickets: $10-21. Information: 267-603-3533; www.bckseet.com.

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