'Dying Gaul' is smartly cast and directed

It's not sour grapes. The many playwrights who write satirical attacks on Hollywood -- David Mamet, David Rabe and John Patrick Shanley to name a few -- have had notable successes as screenwriters. Maybe it's the confession and revenge of an irate penitent: "OK, I'm a slut! But you're a pig!"

THEATER REVIEW

THE DYING GAUL

PLAYWRIGHT: Craig Lucas

WHERE: Intiman Theatre, Seattle Center

WHEN: Through Aug. 18

WARNING: Frank homoeroticism and coarse language

TICKETS: $10-$42; 206-269-1900 or www.intiman.org

Now Craig Lucas is taking his turn. Lucas' anathema on Hollywood, "The Dying Gaul," is playing at Intiman Theatre. The play is subtle and sneaky. Sometimes it has the remorseless inevitability of an avalanche. And sometimes it is as contrived as a fourth- grader's excuses for not doing homework.

Though characters and plot vacillate between solid and shaky, the Intiman production, directed by Bartlett Sher, is consistently excellent.

As the inevitable corrupt and corrupting producer, Laurence Ballard is fascinating. He has the capacity to raise that all-important question: "What's he going to do next?" The evil movie mogul is a familiar caricature. But Ballard's mix of charm, outrageousness, drive and weakness are fresh and scary.

His character, Jeffrey, is a skillful seducer. He debauches Robert, a talented but inexperienced screenwriter, both sexually and morally. And when a vindictive Robert takes control, Ballard makes a plausible plunge from exalted to crushed.

As Robert, Jay Goede is Ballard in reverse. He goes from despair to fiendish determination. Along the way Robert proclaims Buddhist precepts. By the end of the play, he has stumbled and fallen at every step along the Noble Eightfold Path (a sort of Buddhist Ten Commandments). Goede does something eerie with his role. He shows evil arising from passivity, guilt and sorrow.

Robert's lover has died of AIDS. When Jeffrey takes over Robert's body and his script, Robert's conscious depression and his unconscious anger rev up to lethal levels. Jeffrey's wife, Elaine, is fond of Robert. Through a bizarre Internet hoax, she tries to console him.

Now here comes the implausible part. Elaine breaks into the office of Robert's psychotherapist. She reads preposterously detailed records. She uses the material -- gathered how? The doctor doesn't takes notes -- to convince Robert that she is the soul of his dead lover.

Myra Platt, as the unbelievable Elaine, proceeds with utter conviction: first cynical, then grasping, then compassionate and finally wrathful. David Pichette, as Robert's therapist, adds a very useful note of restraint and rationality. Also a Buddhist, he at least tries to keep on the Noble Eightfold Path.

A setting by Andrew Jackness is a maze of sinister pathways. Flanking the center of the stage are flourishing beds of monkshood, a deadly poisonous relative of our innocent delphiniums and larkspurs. A professional landscaper would use lethal ornamentals for a home with small children? Another implausibility.

Lighting by Mary Louise Geiger and sound by Stephen LeGrand become increasingly creepy as evil intensifies.

About that title: It refers to an ancient Greek statue commemorating a victory over the Gauls who invaded a Greek city in what is now Turkey. Along with Michelangelo's "Bound Slave" and the many depictions of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, the statue of the "Dying Gaul" is a queasy-making icon of sexy suffering and alluring victimhood.

P-I theater critic Joe Adcock can be reached at 206-448-8369 or joeadcock@seattlepi.com

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