In ‘Sparrow,’ a homecoming that fails to fly

October 31, 2009|Sandy MacDonald, Globe Correspondent

STONEHAM - See if you can connect the dots identifying the source material that went into “The Sparrow,’’ a House Theatre of Chicago production being given its East Coast premiere by Stoneham Theatre.

Here’s the situation: A high-school girl named Emily Book returns to her Midwestern hometown to enroll as the sole senior. A decade ago, she was dispatched to a convent school, right after a school bus accident killed her entire class. Hmmm - curious.

Dressed in droopy black like Wednesday Addams (with braids to boot), the socially awkward Emily makes minimal attempts to assimilate. Physicalizing the role to a discomfiting extreme (a pattern evidently promulgated among the entire cast by director Nathan Allen, who is billed as having “conceived’’ this dance-drama), Dillan Arrick, as Emily, hunches like a question mark, her eyes focused on the floor. Yet despite Emily’s best efforts to maintain a low profile, the truth will out that she has certain telekinetic powers, not always under her full control, which can be used for good or ill.

Yes, it’s “Carrie’’ meets “The Sweet Hereafter’’ (Russell Banks’s novel - and Atom Egoyan’s film - about a rural town devastated by just such a school bus disaster), with maybe a smattering of “The Exorcist’’ thrown in for good measure.

This arty amalgam lacks the gritty realism of any of the latter works, however. The constant intrusion of dramatic devices - slide projections and videos auguring the accident, for instance, or the practice of having the ensemble parade photos of their lost love ones - ensures that real life, with all its messy, fascinating chaos, is given little room to breathe. What we’re witnessing has been painstakingly curated for effect. Particularly cloying is a cumbersome dollhouse that Emily’s bereaved host parents - Ilyse Robbins and Russell Garrett, doing their best to shoulder pathos-laden roles - must lug onstage to indicate a change of venue.

No amount of fussy physical detail can fill in the blanks of a vague and generic script, unanchored in time or space. What is this place, really, where a young woman’s fancy turns to Gene Kelly and high-schoolers comport themselves like fourth-graders rampaging at recess? (The cast, mostly 20-something or older, approaches the kid stuff with grating overkill.) Either the heartland really does remain an innocent redoubt, even in this age of premature, media-dictated sophistication, or the conceptualizers haven’t thought this through.

They’re perhaps too busy reinterpreting, as dance, the supposed tropes of high-school life - the hazing that is dodgeball (surely a pastime more common in grade school), the thrill of a closely matched basketball game, the emotional vicissitudes endemic to a homecoming dance. This particular one, as choreographed by Tommy Rapley, verges on a hoedown.

Only Jonathan Popp as the would-be cool teacher and Elizabeth Erwin as the school’s alpha girl manage to ground the story in any sort of recognizable reality. Everyone else appears to have matriculated at the High School for the Over-Emoting Arts.