'Radio Free' crackles with humor, insight

PAWTUCKET -- The Gamm Theatre's current production should make this small, vibrant outfit the envy of larger companies in Boston and beyond. It's the world premiere of "Radio Free Emerson," a sharp, funny, and telling play that the Gamm commissioned from Paul Grellong, a 29-year-old Brown graduate who's now a scriptwriter for "Law & Order: SVU."

The play isn't perfect, but few new plays are. And its problems are of a minor, eminently fixable kind: a few passages of excessively obvious exposition, a couple of loose ends in the plot and a couple of others that are too neatly tied up, and a closing scene that needs some tweaking to make it resonate as fully and subtly as Grellong intends.

Far more interesting than the show's flaws are its strengths. Grellong tells the story of Al Gregory, the estranged son of a longtime radio talk-show host who returns to Providence for his father's funeral and soon ignites the airwaves with an incendiary "eulogy" turned rant. Al, it turns out, has spent his exile on a Maine lobster boat reading Ralph Waldo Emerson to his crewmates, and the 19th-century Transcendentalist has inspired Al to develop his own self-gratifying philosophy.

Al's ideas so goose the ratings that he quickly gets a regular show. Basically, he tells his listeners, doing good means just doing whatever makes you happy. Cheat on your wife, break business deals, betray your friends -- if you want to do it and it makes you feel good, it's the right thing to do. Unsurprisingly, this advice creates a few ripples when Al's listeners start following it -- and especially when his biggest fan, a childhood friend who's now married to Al's old crush, jumps on the bandwagon.

As several of Al's callers make clear, Emerson himself would hardly recognize his credo of self-reliance in this ode to self-indulgence. But Grellong gives Al such energy and charisma that it's easy to see why people go for it anyway. If the basic setup -- loose cannon in a sound booth -- recalls Eric Bogosian's "Talk Radio," rest assured that Grellong has created a uniquely abrasive and compelling character of his own, and one who lives in his own messy but sharply realized world.

Al's surrounded, too, by complex characters with their own quirks and sorrows: his manipulative and selfish mother, the grasping doctor who's wooing her, longtime station employee who's more family retainer than colleague, and, especially, old pal Henry and his complicated wife, Gina. All these lives overlap and intersect at work and at home: Henry's first big construction contract is the doctor's dream house, Gina is the radio show's producer, and the obsequious employee seems to spend as much time washing dishes as he does screening calls.

Their sins and secrets overlap, too, sometimes so much so that the plot teeters on the edge of soap opera, but Grellong mostly keeps even his shockers just plausible enough. And he shifts the action deftly from studio to home front and back again -- transitions made simpler by Al's decision to move in with Henry and Gina, though of course that move makes everything else far more complex.

The Gamm handles all this with dexterity and aplomb. Director Peter Sampieri makes the most of Dan Bilodeau's simple, ingenious set, which has a "construction crew" carry furniture on and off its bare framing to evoke living room, radio station, seaside porch, or construction site, as the scene demands. And the Gamm's artistic director, Tony Estrella, delivers a blazingly charismatic performance as Al. We see just how misguided he is, but we can't help feeling guided by him, too.

The rest of the ensemble works strongly together, with Steve Kidd a particular standout as the sweet, slightly desperate Henry. Charles Cofone's sound design completes the sense of a coherent, well-crafted staging, with snippets of construction noise, seagulls' cries, or Red Sox radio broadcasts setting the mood for each scene. Grellong has created real, living characters and put them in a carefully observed milieu, and the Gamm has honored his hard work by bringing it all to life.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.