The Arts

THEATER REVIEW |

Strawberry Theater Workshop's sharp production of the spooky play "The Bells," by Theresa Rebeck, plunks us into a bleak terrain that lures, tests and can easily crush anyone who dares explore it.

This is the remote end of Alaska's frigid Yukon Territory, where one gets easily lost and disoriented in an unforgiving winter landscape of near-interminable darkness and blinding whiteouts.

The mountains looming in Montana Tippett's extraordinary set design also may deceive your eyes: from moment to moment they look like misty peaks, or jagged chunks of quartz, or a billowing mirage.

As in novels by Jack London, and a slew of moralistic action movies, Rebeck uses this harsh frontier as a backdrop for Darwinian survival — and the greed, revenge, death and retribution that attend it.

These themes are sometimes posed in Rebeck's script with harrowing power — and sometimes with ponderous monologues and obvious plotting.

But the crafty Rebeck has rigged up "The Bells" (adapted from a popular Victorian melodrama with a different setting) for a very theatrical ride. And director Julie Beckman, a strong cast and a splendid design team deliver that.

There's nothing like a dark secret eating away at a man's soul, and a ghost lurking ominously, to get the melodramatic gears turning.

Peter Crook plays the mercurial Mathias, a Yukon innkeeper who runs a remote establishment that's curiously prosperous, even in the last gasp of Alaska's 19th-century gold rush.

Mathias dotes on his pretty, lonely daughter Annette (Brenda Joyner), and is excessively generous to scruffy derelicts, sad victims of "gold fever."

There are reasons why he's kept them boozed up for years. And reasons why the arrival of a refined French Canadian bounty hunter, Baptiste (Patrick Allcorn), delights, then terrifies Mathias.

One quickly sorts out why the phantom of a young Chinese prospector (a wistfully compelling Jose Abaoag) lingers near the inn. But Rebeck withholds the exact nature of the story's defining sin long enough to make for a truly shattering ending, when all is revealed.

Crook mines every sliver of believable humanity from the spectacle of a haunted man's psychic torment. (That's where the eerie bell chimes come in.)

But there's hokum aplenty — in the script's notion of madness, and the production's stumblebum treatment of the vagrant prospectors.

There's a big, grim load of ruminations on faith, moral rectitude, and "What does it mean to be human in the wilderness?" But "The Bells" explores such concerns more powerfully in interaction than in contemplation.

A brief excursion by paranoid Mathias and a pathetic blackmailer (a heart-wrenching Galen Joseph Osier), is sheer, white-knuckle agony. And it tells us all we need to know about a "good" man's long slide into a frozen moral abyss.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com