Luck and chance are persistent elements in Brendan Healey’s new work, as hardworn old salts rattle through their lists of superstitions that ward off destruction. So too do the baristas cite their own signs of fate in a customer’s drink orders.
It’s one of the nice parallels in “Emerald and the Love Song of the Dead Fishermen,” premiering at Annex Theatre. So too is the shanty sung by the coffee slingers, engaging their milk steamers as a sailor would weigh anchor.
Yet it’s to chance that Healey flings these elements, seeming to rely on luck to allow them fall into a meaningful play.
Emerald is a young woman with green hair and a father lost at sea too long ago for her to remember him. Pining for the absence in her life, she seeks him through the legendary Day of the Dead Fishermen when the spirits of those drowned return to a remote island. With a woman masquerading as a male sea captain, she is joined by her coffee shop boss and pursued by a pair of rule bound corporate flaks.
Healey seeks a fairy tale with a poetic air of heartache, cut with doses of the outlandish. The tale is augmented visually through puppets and aurally through sea shanties played and sung by the cast. But the work is far too haphazard and undisciplined to cohere, and none of his characters are genuine or invested enough to compel.
This follows an increasingly tiresome recent pattern for the Annex Theater. The long-running company has often been a venue for bold, locally generated work, and under the current artistic direction of playwright and former theater critic for The Stranger, Bret Fetzer, Annex has intensified its emphasis on producing local writers. Their newly announced season for 2009-10 consists entirely of premieres by a cadre of Seattle playwrights. Thus far, all have been quirky, often profane pieces rooted in fantastic premises – tellingly, much like the plays Fetzer himself writes.
For all its flaws, “Emerald” is quite salvageable, most obviously as a children’s piece if excised of its contrived cynicism and lyrical pretensions. In its current condition, however, it’s quite at sea.
“Emerald and the Love Song of the Dead Fishermen” runs through Aug. 29 at Annex Theatre, 1100 E. Pike St. Tickets: $15/$10 student; (800) 838-3006 or brownpapertickets.com.
