'Illusion' provides real payoff

CHAPEL HILL -- 'The Illusion" is a bit slow to get going, but patience is well rewarded. Playwright Tony Kushner's rewrite of Pierre Corneille's "L'Illusion Comique" from 1636 is touching and funny, if a little heavy-handed here and there, and wraps up with a couple of delightfully surprising twists.

The play premiered in 1988, five years before Kushner won the Pulitzer Prize for "Angels in America." PlayMakers Repertory Company's production marks the first play directed by Joseph Haj since becoming producing artistic director of the professional arm of UNC-Chapel Hill's Department of Dramatic Art.

"The Illusion" has to do with love, theater and -- of course -- illusion, and whether or not Kushner had it in mind, it bears more than a little resemblance to "The Fantasticks." Like that lovable chestnut, "The Illusion" features magic, deception, confused young lovers and their befuddled elders, takeoffs on commedia dell'arte conventions and even a commentating mute.

That comparison, though, accentuates the one rub: While "The Fantasticks" is clearly whimsy, "The Illusion" seems to toy with some portentous message that never becomes more than the stuff of ruminating undergraduates.

The action is framed by an aging father's quest for reconciliation with his son. Pridamont (played by David Adamson), a lawyer facing up to his mortality, consults the wizard Alcandre (Ray Dooley) to find out what has become of the boy he disowned (Christopher Taylor) 15 years earlier. Having made his way to Alcandre's cave -- to sound effects suggesting we're about to see "Forbidden Planet" as directed by Alfred Hitchcock -- and encountered the magician's fearsome Amanuensis (Nikolas Priest) -- Pridamont is treated to three visions from the boy's subsequent life.

At least, that's what Pridamont and the audience are left to think they are, though hints suggest that the scenes are more and/or less than what they seem. The scenes develop a coherent story -- characters age, change, reveal more and more about themselves -- but for some reason, their names change from scene to scene, and details of what we think are real life remain subject to the wizard's manipulation.

But all will be revealed -- and that, in the immortal words of Forrest Gump, is all we have to say about that.

The first of the scenes is largely responsible for the slow early going. The son, here called "Calisto," is a stylized swain pursuing an equally smitten but hard-to-get Melibea (Janie Brookshire). He's confronted by the rival Pleribo (Wesley Schultz) and abetted by the sly servant Elicia (Allison Reeves). These familiar period pieces are played such that we wonder whether the actors are deliberately overplaying or just haven't rehearsed enough.

Moving into the second scene, though, the story gets more interesting, and the mood is blessedly lightened by the arrival of Matamore (Jeffrey Blair Cornell), a grandiose nobleman in the mold of Barney Fife. The play begins to manage a neat balance of gloom and giggle most of the way in.

Cornell, in fact, comes near to stealing the show -- both as the absurd peer and as the ultimate sadder-but-wiser Everyman who adds the play's final, lovely, poignant twist. Reeves, too, is a seriocomic delight, a worldly counterpoint to the ethereal Cornell.

Toward the end, the show bogs down again when Alcandre waxes philosophical on the nature of love, theater and illusion. It's a somber and windy speech, too weighty for the situation -- Charles Boyer or Maurice Chevalier might have pulled it off, but Dooley lacks the accent to make it work.

"The Illusion" is fun. The final image sticks in your mind, and whether it's something to ponder or just feel good about -- that just depends on how you'd rather have your money's worth.