Cinnabar show confronts past, present with humor, pathos

The premise of The Pavilion is succinct: If only…

And the Narrator sets a framework for the Cinnabar Theater comedy drama in Petaluma: “This is a play about time,” he explains at the git-go. 

Enter Kari, who’s been lost in a dead-end job and a rotten marriage, and Peter, a momentously screwed up shrink who’s lost, period. They might be considered star-crossed lovers except that their old relationship was thwarted by inner demons, not outside sources.

He craves redemption, and a new start, which seems unlikely since she’s been livid for 20 years.

Metaphors abound.

Being buried in a safety-deposit vault. Being trapped in a relationship with a partner who specializes in painting still life. Being enraptured by shooting stars.

Another that’s impossible to miss: Neither Kari (Sami J. Granberg) nor Peter (Nathan Cummings) wears a watch. And it’s clear that time, for both of them, pretty much stopped in high school, when he knocked her up and then abandoned her.

Behind them, in front of them and in effect surrounding them is the Narrator (brilliantly portrayed by Jeff Coté), who comes off as a second cousin to the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town, perhaps a third cousin once removed to the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret.

All three actors are in peak form, but Coté does the heaviest lifting.

He’s responsible for floating playwright Craig Wright’s philosophical and poetic meanderings, and for spotlighting a multiplicity of gag lines and distorted faces as he unveils a humongous amount of quirky secondary characters.

Those beings range from a drunken minister and pot-smoking lawman to a volunteer at a for-profit suicide hotline and a woman so hostile about relationships she’s adopted the dictum “Never forgive!”

Flexible lighting by Wayne Hovey, meanwhile, almost becomes a character itself, albeit cosmic.

And the lone set by Joe Elwick is a flawless backdrop — a picture postcard horizon over the lake, an impressionistic pavilion, a couple of festive covers on two tiny tables, four Japanese lights, and, off to one side, a swing and gardens with decorative lighting.

You feel as if you’ve been there.  

And it instantaneously allows the actors to show distance as well as closeness.

The wooden lakeside dance hall, focus of the class reunion, is soon to be razed, then replaced by an amphitheater. Can Kari and Peter replace their past as efficiently?

Cinnabar Theater director Tara Blau makes you care about the answer. And as you patiently wait, she easily shifts the characters around the stage (and in the audience) like a chess master at the top of her game.

If there’s a problem, it’s Wright, who although he professes to have an upbeat worldview, peppers the show with grim one-liners.

• “Hold onto the past, even out of love [and] it will tear you to shreds.”

• “There’s a pain beyond hurt…and it just weighs all around you like some sick gravity.”

• “Everybody is stupid about everything.”

Even lines played for humor have a potholed aspect. A case in point: “Women have only so many eggs…men have only so many feelings.”

While the play seeks to be all-inclusive, catholic in the “little c” sense, it gets mired too often in bleakness and deviant behaviors — despite the many, many laughs it provides (via small town gossiping, mostly). I have the uneasy feeling Wright may have romped as a toddler not in a pastel blue playpen but a dank cellar.

No surprise, I’d guess, since he scripted shows for Six Feet Under, which was highly heralded for its dark humor.

That said, Cinnabar’s Pavilion still provides pathos, humor, romance, poetry and philosophy at a fraction of the price most Bay Area theaters charge for a ticket.

No, everything doesn’t get neatly tied in a shiny pink ribbon. But it’s still a good theater piece likely to stir your emotions and make you think.

And while it offers no quick fixes for life, it does show that even if the universe won’t bend quite the way you’d like it to, you can go home again — if only for a little while.

If only…

The Pavilion plays at Cinnabar Theater, 3333 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma, through Sept. 22. Evening performances, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; matinees, Sunday, 2 p.m. Tickets: $15 to $25. (707) 763-8920 or cinnabartheater.org.