When Is The Lunar Eclipse

CATF play reveals passage of time

Editor's note: Reviews of this season's five plays at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown will be published throughout the week. This is the fourth in the series.

SHEPHERDSTOWN - What is the nature of an eclipse? Is it simply the moon becoming dark when occluded from the sun by the Earth? To characterize a lunar eclipse like that is to make darkness its definition. The moon becomes the thing that is unseen. But we know, even when absent of reflected light, the Man in the Moon is still up there.

Sam Shepard's play, "Ages of the Moon," now in production at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, is as much about what isn't there as what is. What we get onstage is simple: a couple of Adirondack chairs, a table, a front porch, a lazy ceiling fan and a bottle of bourbon. Inhabiting this space are two men, old friends, in a tense reminiscence, recalling events that they may or may not have experienced together and may altogether be the myths of old men's minds.

Ames, whose house it is, has appealed to Byron in a moment of isolation, after being ousted from his home when his woman found another woman's phone number scribbled on the margin of his fishing map. Shepard samples folksiness several times in the piece, as when Ames recalls meeting Roger Miller, the singer/songwriter who described himself as a "man of means by no means," in the evergreen musical paean to solitude that begins, "Trailers for sale or rent."

An earlier, New York production prompted comparison of this play to a Samuel Beckett piece, in which nothing much happens, very extravagantly. Vladimir and Estragon, the hapless saps of "Waiting for Godot," employ vaudeville maneuvers, pointless activities and argument to pass the time in the hallmark exercise in existentialism that Beckett conceived for the stage.

In Shepard's play there is argument - lots of it. Friends Byron and Ames bicker over word use, distrust each other's storytelling and eventually push comes to shove. More than once, Ames charges Byron to "get off my porch," only to recant, pour another tumbler of bourbon and resume the conversation. At its liveliest, the action includes a shotgun, retrieved from offstage, that produces two resounding blasts to tumble the ceiling fan to the floor.

But anybody familiar with the combination of testosterone and ethanol knows that sometimes a guy will employ a shotgun for a silly reason. Other than that, there just isn't much else to fill what is essentially a flat dramatic arc that deposits us at the conclusion close to where we joined it at the start.

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