21A (Arts Equity)

[July 16th, 2008]

So much for culture in the ’Couv. After three seasons at the Main Street Theatre, Llewellyn J. Rhoe has uprooted his Arts Equity production company—“Vancouver’s first professional live theater”—and moved his operations to Portland.

Arts Equity had a good run up north, premiering four new works by local artists Tom Cone, Tad Savinar and Connor Kerns alongside classics by Albee, O’Neill, Pinter and the like. And although Rhoe’s determination to present theater of the “I can’t believe I saw that in Vancouver” sort didn’t haul in the hometown audiences, the company’s prospects on this side of the river look pretty good: The season includes a new play by Cone, who wrote the book for Arts Equity’s very successful one-man musical, Herringbone; Sam Shepard’s farce, God of Hell; O’Neill’s Anna Christie and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, performed in repertory.

With all that to look forward to, it’s disappointing that Rhoe chose to make Arts Equity’s premiere in Portland with a meaningless one-man trifle. 21A—by Minnesota playwright Kevin Kling, best known for his commentaries on All Things Considered—is a 60-minute play about a few very strange moments aboard the bus that runs between Minneapolis and St. Paul. It’s an exercise in middle-American quirkiness, worth a chuckle—little more.

The driver and all of the passengers are played with moderate success by Joey LeBard. He covers his costume changes with recorded offstage conversations between the driver, who steps off the bus for a coffee, and the inhabitants of the Super America shopping center. There are many of these pit stops, because there are a lot of passengers: an off-kilter old woman carrying a load of cat food from Trader Joe’s, a drunken bum wearing an empty case of Bridgeport IPA for a helmet, and an overzealous advocate for public transportation, among others. There’s some shouting, some shoving and some gunfire. But don’t worry! Everything’s A-OK in the end.

With the strained accents and self-consciously goofy sensibility, 21A resembles an episode of “Guy Noir: Private Eye” written the morning after Garrison Keillor’s latest bachelor party—weird and menacing, but still a feel-good piece in the end. Like the passengers on the stationary bus, you’ll probably wonder when the damn thing is going to go somewhere. It never does.