Shawn's heavy-handed 'Aunt Dan and Lemon' leaves a sour aftertaste

LOWELL -- Right off the bat, it's clear that we're dealing with a nut job -- and that's before Lemon, a frail yet imperious young woman surrounded by vials of vegetable elixirs, starts rhapsodizing about the efficiency of the Nazi death camps.

In "Aunt Dan and Lemon," now at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lemon (Jeanine Serralles) is presented as a housebound invalid, but she's actually a mouthpiece for an outlook that playwright Wallace Shawn, a liberal intellectual, clearly would find abhorrent. In this 1985 play she's trotted out to represent a thesis.

Through musings and flashbacks to Lemon's childhood in the early '70s, we're given some idea of how she came to form her world view: At the impressionable age of 11, she fell under the thrall of Aunt Dan (Carmen Roman), a presumably charismatic friend of her parents. It's Dan -- short for Danielle -- who gave Lemon, nee Leonora, her childhood nickname.

I say "presumably" because in Shawn's depiction and Roman's delivery, Dan comes across as a galloping bore, the kind of family friend who talks politics ad nauseam, drowning out everyone else. (Lemon's mother, a gentle soul played luminously by Dee Nelson, doesn't stand a chance.) Buoyed by her belief in her own brilliance -- Lemon brags that Dan was "one of the youngest Americans to ever teach at Oxford" -- this gasbag just will not shut up.

Dan emerges as an outspoken hawk who views Henry Kissinger as a virtual god. She's also a self-aggrandizing narcissist who finds it perfectly appropriate to fill a child's head with romantic tales of adulterous liaisons and lurid reminiscences about her "wild" life in swinging London.

Here's where things get confusing -- not just for Lemon, but for the audience. The same actors playing the parents double as hard-partying types, and unless you keep very close track of the names being bandied about (amid some very fake badinage), you're apt to assume that these are the parents, before they went respectable. (In the New Group's Obie-winning 2003 revival, starring Lili Taylor and Kristen Johnson, that problem was solved by hiring more actors.) Little matter, though, because these characters are likewise two-dimensional, though Tamara Hickey lends an aura of doomed loveliness to the role of Mindy, a freelance call girl (and more). Sex and death get all mixed up -- when do they not? -- and Lemon ends up a sicko.

But did Dan cause the damage? Or, in choosing an acolyte, did she happen to luck into an appreciative sociopath?

Despite Serralles's considerable skill in the role, Lemon is ultimately there purely for argument's sake. There's little to suggest that she might be a real person whose situation and preoccupations should concern us, despite Shawn's heavy-handed attempts to get us to see her in ourselves.

In Lemon's closing monologue, Shawn works overtime to implicate us in her obsession with -- and callousness regarding -- the extinction of life, extending to mass murder. Yes, there are political implications, and yes, they're timelier than ever, but most of us don't attend theater to be lectured or awakened from our ignorant slumber. The production is physically impressive (especially Anita Fuchs's set, like an oversize specimen cabinet), but the text disappoints. It's meant to scintillate and shock; instead it blathers.