Layers of truth in love triangle
It is almost unbelievable that "The Oil Thief," a mesmerizing new one-act by Joyce Van Dyke, takes just 80 minutes to play out on the Boston Playwrights' Theatre stage.
In that brief span, Van Dyke creates three unforgettable characters, depicts the complex and shifting relationships among them, mixes in a striking but never jarring series of allusions to "Hamlet," explores the geology of both the Niger Delta and the Shenandoah Valley, and does it all against the backdrop of the global energy crisis. And what's even more remarkable is that, for all that, the play's 80 minutes never feel crowded or rushed.
Amy, the play's central character, is a geologist who helps oil companies find likely new spots to drill. She's in a longtime relationship with Rex, a New York actor who's currently playing Claudius, the murderous uncle and usurper in "Hamlet." She has also fallen in love with Aleksi, a young black American who works as a translator for Russian oil interests, and it's her conflicting and shifting feelings for the two men that form the most visible thread of the plot.
But Van Dyke (best known for "A Girl's War") is interested in much more than your basic love triangle - and it's her wider interests, along with her subtlety and craft in weaving them together with the romance, that make "The Oil Thief" a sneakily intense emotional experience. We are initially most engaged by the story of Amy, Aleksi, and Rex, but what gives them and their story real depth is the wealth of knowledge and passions that each of them brings: geology and oil politics, race relations and finding one's path in life, Shakespeare and the unstoppable passage of time, and much more.
Rather than dwarfing the characters, these larger themes enrich our sense of them - and, curiously, it's the vastness of Van Dyke's perspective that makes the smallest moments of personal heartache affect us so strongly. Even as we're being reminded that these people - like Hamlet, like us - are just specks in the vast river of time, we're entering all the more completely into their particular drama.
The three actors here bring out the nuances and depths of Van Dyke's intelligent, lyrical writing with grace and power. Melinda Lopez's miraculously lucid expressions let us sense every thought in Amy's mind, just as her grounded, present presence lets us feel her passions. Amy is a fascinating character: smart, thoughtful, but so tired of being a "good girl" that she just can't keep being smart and thoughtful.
Rex is a quieter, smaller role, but Will Lyman invests it with similarly profound shadings and humanity. Rex, too, is intelligent and self-aware, sometimes painfully so; he hates getting old and knows exactly what a cliche that is - yet hates it all the same. Van Dyke gives him a couple of neatly written moments of hesitant, groping attempts to articulate his feelings, and Lyman delivers them with such understated craft that you'd swear, as you're meant to, that you're watching a man just thinking out loud.
As for Aleksi, a young actor could be congratulated merely for not being wiped off the stage by these two strong presences. But Sheldon Best, a recent Brandeis graduate, does much more than that: He brings out all of Aleksi's charm and charisma, but he also lets us see the youthful insecurities, doubts, and confusions that Aleksi can't quite see himself. We know, Rex predicts, and even Amy can't help half-acknowledging, that this young man won't stay forever with a woman twice his age, but Best lets us see, for a while, how he and Amy can tell themselves that he might.
Judy Braha directs these stunning performances with a seemingly effortless sense of flow and rhythmic variation; each scene receives just the weight it should, then segues smoothly to the next. For all the information and incident that she has to make sure the actors get across, she never lets the emotional and intellectual tension go slack.
Jon Savage's set, like the play itself, holds more than seems possible without ever seeming crowded. A couple of inclined wooden platforms become tables, beds, and rocky outcrops, while shelves on the back wall hold the few props - wineglasses, a jar of crude oil - required to help set each scene.
At the center of that back wall is a large, moodily lighted dark rectangle, which could read as a painting, a sculpture, a river, or an excavated sample of oil-rich shale. Its layers curve and bulge and bend back on themselves, inviting us to contemplate what mysteries lie within.
It's just a piece of rock. It's a slice of the whole planet. It's a speck. And it contains multitudes. 