THEATER REVIEW

‘BLUE Heart” is the umbrella name for two short plays – “Heart’s Desire” and “Blue Kettle” – by Caryl Churchill at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Feb. 21, in a 1997 production by London’s Out of Joint company. “Heart’s Desire,” the first play, is about a family event and the fact of time. In Julian McGowan’s abstract, Mondrian-like kitchen father Brian, mother Alice and Aunt Maisie are awaiting the return from Australia of daughter Susy. “She’s taking her time,” are Brian’s first words.

Brian is played with manic intensity and zany precision by Bernard Gallagher as a martinet prey to wild, dark, sudden urges. His wife Alice, the gloriously sensible June Watson, is a sharp, bossy sort fond of bold surprises. Aunt Maisie, the pricelessly meek Mary Macleod, is a fussy, recessive woman given to gloomy reveries.

But “Heart’s Desire” is not the simple domestic narrative it, for a few seconds, pretends to be. It’s a formalist game in which Churchill rewinds her story and begins it again about a score of times.

The stop-start revisions – nightmarishly hard for the actors – grow lurid with the interruption into the spotless kitchen of terrorists in ski-masks, a giant ostrich, a gaggle of kids, a fascist policeman. These invasions from outside are paralleled by the increasingly uncontrolled monologues by the family: Brian itches to devour his own body; Alice blurts out news of a long affair; Maisie broods on death.

It’s as if Churchill had watched one too many episodes of “Eastenders” or some such soap and cried, “Oh, how can one go on telling these banal stories. I’m going to have some fun and explode the whole idea of narrative.” Accent on “fun.”

Call it theater of the absurd or Beckettian if you want; cite Alan Ayckbourn’s juggling with dimensions if you like. Disrupting the coherence of story and character is a familiar agenda. What’s fresh and surprising here is the high humor of the enterprise; this is the funniest play in town.

In “Blue Kettle” Derek, a scheming man of 41, tricks a series of old women who’ve long ago given up children for adoption, into believing that he’s their son.

This sentimental drama of cruelty and mother-love is beautifully directed by Stafford Clark and lit by Johanna Town, who exquisitely suggests a cafe, a museum of natural history, a garden and hospital by mere lighting. Pearce Quigley makes Derek an ambiguous, anguished bastard; June Watson, Mary Macleod, Gabrielle Blunt (his real mom) and Anna Wing make affecting mothers.

But Churchill subverts this tale as thoroughly as she did the earlier family gathering. Here it’s not the narrative that collapses but the language. Slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, two-syllable words become “kettle” and one-syllable words become “blue.”

When Derek says to his mothers, “You didn’t know you kettle have other children,” we think we’ve misheard. But a pattern soon emerges. “Blue didn’t you keep me?” asks a sad Derek about his adoption. We can, to our surprise, follow what’s going on although the language is in a state of entropy. It’s like hearing a play in Finnish and not needing to know Finnish.

By the penultimate scene with the two fake mothers at cross purposes, “Blue” and “kettle” have usurped almost all words. Explains Derek, “I kettle you to blue each other” – i.e., “I wanted you to know each other.” Sly Churchill eats her cake and has it, too, in “Blue Kettle.” She makes her points about the hollowness, decay, arbitrariness and insincerity of language, and she writes a touching melodrama.