May 7, 1998 • South End News™, Page 17

Challenge of communication central in ‘Pictures’

by Tom Scanlon, Contributing Writer

What the audience soon discovers with Centastage Theatre's production of Pictures at an Exhibition is that it is in for two plays, two very different plays.

The first act recounts the now in-famous story of a woman arrested in a Cambridge photo lab when arriving to pick up pictures of her naked four-year-old son. Margaret Pasqualini (Elizabeth Duff) is a young mother and pho-tography student driven by a passion for her art and a love for her only son Alex (who is mute).

Yet it is a drive that strains her marriage with husband Matthew (Douglass A. Flynn). For the final project in her advanced photography class, Margaret chooses an essay of the nude Alex. And the fun begins. With a cast of cartoon-like characters, Cambridge playwright Michael Bettencourt depicts the world's perverse and hysterical response to the Pasqualini arrest.

The play opens with a small mob of press hounding the suspect as she's whisked to the police station. After she passes, the beat reporters engage in sarcastic, quippy banter. The characters are overly cartoonish, the dialogue overly vamped. It sets the atmosphere of a tabloid feeding frenzy.

Alone in the spotlight, Margaret washes the imaginary Alex in the bath-tub, washing him with love and sensual language (comparing his skin to deli-cious fruit and cinnamon buns). When Matthew arrives home from work unexpectedly, she's happy to see him but also agitated that her time with Alex has been interrupted. We begin to see Margaret's singular obsession with the photo project -- and the strain it places on their marriage. Concerned little about the pressure Matthew faces in securing employment contracts, Margaret rushes off to pick up the soon to be controversial photos.

At the generically cheesy Zone 6 Kodak photo lab, Margaret is met by police detectives who've seized her photos. Under arrest for the nude pho-tos, she snaps: Duff deftly balances righteous indignation with a kick-and-scream resistance. So begins an angst-ridden struggle for Margaret, as the judge makes her choose between either paying a fine, apologizing and doing community service, or 30 days in jail. Husband Matthew desperately pleads with her to eat a little crow pie and return home to her family, so they can end the nightmare and get on with their lives.

The first act tells the story in a series of scenes that are linear and pat, switching between pop culture spoof and the more serious family and legal proceedings. It is almost a methodical set-up: the circus of the outside world, the frustrating legal proceedings and Margaret's inner reflections. But any realness that might be given to the external events gets sacrificed in favor of mediocre pop culture satire, albeit with some bullseye takeoffs. On a David Brudnoy-like radio talk show, a half-baked townie calls in to compare the exploitation of the little boy Alex to the plight of the migrant "fahm workas."

According to Bettencourt, he intentionally dilutes the entire controversy and its various elements (privacy, free expression, child abuse). "I thought they were too easily retailed, too ready-made," says Bettencourt. "When everyone has an opinion and a judgment, then no one gets to own the franchise on truth and accuracy, not even Margaret, who, one would think, would have the clearest claim of all."

Indeed, Margaret reveals herself vividly through a soliloquy on the spiritual oneness she feels when she holds Alex in her arms, the freedom and escape she feels in the photo lab and her joy of nurturing Alex's talent for ex-pressing an unspoken language in front of the camera -- motives that border on obsessive and self-serving. All in all, the first act plays it safe and static, save one scene, in which the entire ensemble of characters (judge, lawyer, D.A., et al) become voices inside Margaret's conscience, looming over her from the shadows of the dim stage.

The second half of Pictures is a bird of a different feather, and it's one that manages to fly on the wings of Jacqui Parker's powerful performance as Vera Cortez -- a black Hispanic serving 25 years for abetting in the murder of her young daughter. Parker's character brings dimension and soul to the somewhat stiff casting, covering emotions that swing from rage to reflection to sadness.

Sharing a cell for 30 days, Vera and Margaret are from two different Americas -- separate, unequal and ignorant of one another. Vera is from an urban barrio or the "dead land," where abuse is a fact of life learned and accepted, and she still bears the scars and calluses to show for it. Margaret is the classic white middle class. While she tries to claim her ghetto credentials, she is strikingly privileged in both mentality and upbringing.

But in this involuntary pairing their differences clash, sometimes violently, forcing one another to communicate and understand. Vera confronts Margaret's assumptions and paternal attitudes about race and class -- questioning her need to always communi-cate for others, whether it's Alex or "those poor oppressed people." In turn, Margaret helps Vera confront her anger, repression, cynicism and low self-esteem -- pushing her to open up, listen to her dead daughter, and to the world outside the prison. In the end, they achieve a truce (as Bettencourt describes in his notes), the beginning of an understanding.

And that's the core message of Pictures: communication. From synthetic prattle of the first act to the real communication in the second act -- where the characters challenge each other to be more human toward them-selves and each other.

With beautiful lighting, solemn transitions, and poetic dialogue -- the prison experience is exquisitely staged. Director Joe Antoun brilliant succeeds in balancing scenes that are confrontational, confessional and at times violent with some that are short and silent. The play would benefit greatly if there were more in that vein rather than the (albeit intentional) vapidity of the first act. Other than for chronology sake, the first act doesn't really do justice in either complementing or setting the stage for the second. Too much of one, not enough of the other. Still, Pictures is well worth the second act.