IF YOU GO
What:A Body of Water by Lee BlessingWhere: Mosaic Theatre, American Heritage Center for the Arts, 12200 W. Broward Blvd., Plantation, through June 1When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. SundayCost: $32 ($27 seniors, $15 students)Info: 954-577-8243 or www.mosaictheatre.comA man and a woman wake up next to each other in a big house on a hill, surrounded by water, a seemingly idyllic picture. But there's a problem.
This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. At least, not that either of them remembers. How did they get here?
The Talking Heads' anthem of social alienation could be the theme for A Body of Water, Lee Blessing's play about two people forced to question every aspect of reality that is Mosaic Theatre's current production.
The befuddled Avis and Moss, a middle-age couple played by Elizabeth Dimon and Ken Clement, cast about for any familiar terrain, internal or external, when Wren (Kim Morgan Dean) shows up.
Is she their daughter, their lawyer, their caretaker, or something else they can't imagine? The young woman offers all those scenarios as possibilities, at times tormenting the couple -- if they are a couple -- and later offering solace. Occasionally, she seems to be in torment herself.
By turns wistful, funny and disturbing, the play doesn't give the audience any certain answers, either.
It's almost impossible not to hear echoes of Waiting for Godot, although Beckett's characters are blissfully unaware they're going in circles. Unlike that gray, resigned pair, the colorful Avis and Moss want to understand the world and their place in it, and are painfully cognizant of all they're missing.
Longtime Mosaic Director Richard Jay Simon ably guides his cast. Dimon, Clement and Dean interact easily, and do an exceptional job of following the hairpin turns their characters' emotions take.
In an early scene, Avis describes an erotic moment with an old boyfriend -- ''a very intense, made-my-legs-tremble sort of memory'' -- and then reveals a little mournfully that he didn't remember it that way at all. The fragments of past she does recall prove unreliable -- is Blessing suggesting that even in the most vivid moments of our lives, loneliness and confusion are inevitable?
Mosaic's set design is always impressive, with attention paid to the smallest details, and it's true here, too. Like the body of water in the title, the audience surrounds the stage, a living room where all action takes place, on three sides. When Moss and Avis look out, wondering what this ''body'' is, and then at each other, we get the message that our identities and sense of meaning depend, at least in part, on what or who is around us.
The play sends us away a little disoriented, every reassuring thought as tinged with uncertainty as it is for the characters. As Avis says, ``We have all this. For a moment, anyway.''
