Review

Actor steps in, retrieves 'Chesapeake'

Chesapeake by Lee Blessing runs through May 8 at American Stage, 211 Third St. S, St. Petersburg. Performances at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday. $20-$27. 727 823-7529; www.americanstage.org

ST. PETERSBURG - Quite a few things are not what they first seem to be in Lee Blessing's Chesapeake, a one-man show starring Ned Averill-Snell at American Stage.

The title refers not only to a body of water near Washington but also to the Chesapeake Bay retriever, a noble hunting dog. Kerr, the character played by Averill-Snell, is a performance artist, yes, but the similarity of his name to "cur" should be noted.

Blessing, best known for his cold war political drama A Walk in the Woods, took a walk on the artistic wild side with Chesapeake. Though the play deals with a serious subject - the culture war that flared up in the 1990s when right-wing zealots tried to shut down the National Endowment for the Arts - it is structured as a madcap romp through the imagination of an avant-garde artist.

As Kerr, Averill-Snell makes pronouncements on art ("Art is an act of will - like crime or law or religion"). He depicts a U.S. senator named Therm Pooley, a cartoony amalgam of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, as well as the senator's wife and lover.

Most impressively, Averill-Snell becomes the very essence of canine loyalty and companionship, as the politician's beloved Lucky, making a brilliant case for "the glory of a dog."

Chesapeake is uneven. The first act takes a long time to set things up, with a story about Kerr's childhood visit to a museum with his father; a philosophical digression into the history of the early 20th century Futurists, precursors of performance art; and a windy account of Kerr's piece de resistance, a striptease to the biblical Song of Solomon.

Patience is rewarded in the second act, which is downright gripping, thanks to a surprising and hilarious transformation that takes place in Kerr.

Averill-Snell pulled off a coup in Chesapeake, considering that he stepped into the show just 10 days before Thursday's opening (Paul Potenza dropped out because of health concerns). Even with such a short rehearsal, he was a charming, confident presence, bouncing around the stage barefoot, running up and down the aisles of the theater, spouting nonstop gab with nary a bobble.

His Kerr seems a bit butch for a predominantly gay and lesbian art form. He's more like a shaggy-haired Irish version of Spalding Gray than, say, Tim Miller or Karen Finley, outrageous performance artists whose NEA grants came under fire in Congress. Blessing's characterization of Kerr as "a young, Southern bisexual" is oddly equivocal, and Averill-Snell's sweet portrayal tends to downplay any challenge to sex and gender conventions.

Similarly, the demagogue Pooley is written more for laughs than meanness, and Averill-Snell plays him as a sentimental rascal, given to boozy late-night soliloquies to his dog.

Director Jeff Norton jazzed up the production with some multimedia elements, such as four TVs onstage that air several scenes that Blessing's script has Kerr acting out. There's music before the show and between the acts from Peter Gabriel, Tom Waits, Jethro Tull and Harry Nilsson. All these additions make a distinct improvement in what might have been an awfully static show.

Chesapeake is intended to be an edgy alternative of sorts to American Stage's Shakespeare in the Park, which opens with Much Ado About Nothing on April 16. It will succeed in that respect if it finds an audience that shares its idealism about art.

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