By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

This year we've seen some wonderful plays anchored in the sciences - Proof, Copenhagen, The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Lanford Wilson was putting science in the mix before any of them, and won Off-Broadway's Best Play Obie Award for Sympathetic Magic in 1997.

Corinne Mohlenhoff turns in a powerhouse performance opposite Matthew Pyle in Lanford Wilson's Sympathetic Magic. (Dick Swaim photo)

Magic is getting its regional premiere from IF Theatre Collective, whose last outing was the political fantasia Lebensraum last fall.

Off-and-on for the last few years, IF is where you go for theater that thinks. (And it looks like it's going back off after this production.)

Most of IF's work is off the beaten track geographically, too. For Magic, you'll have to work harder than driving downtown. You'll have to trek to the student center at Xavier University where IF found the right-priced (that would be free) studio (rehearsal) space.

It's a flawed production, but anyone who loves big ideas should consider the $10 investment worth it.

Universal themes

Wilson's theme is no smaller than the universe, filled with chaos and dark matter. To Wilson, this closely resembles the equally mysterious ways of the human heart and mind.

Magic opens with astrophysicist Andy (Matthew Pyle) presenting a lecture and a joke from Second City, about a scientist who promises a "short talk on the universe." Why this subject? "Because there isn't anything else."

But there is one other thing - we as humans in the universe. So even as Wilson sets Andy off to follow a major discovery in the infinite night sky, he pursues the stories of an extended family to follow profound themes, from creation of the universe to creation of art, from birth to death, even from love to indifference (a state far worse than hate.)

Andy lives with Barbara (Corinne Mohlenhoff), a sculptor who has just earned a huge response, from loathing to exultation, from her first show. Despite their best efforts, she's pregnant.

Barbara's half-brother (Barry J. Williams) is a gay Episcopal minister who is thinking life would be simpler if he chose celibacy. He and Barbara haven't been close, but their outspoken anthropologist mother (Sunny Rhoads) is ill and decisions must be made.

Close friends and co-workers enter the story, adding refracting light, different viewpoints, new elements to the chaos of life. Wilson fills it with ironies and the unexpected, and all of it feels real.

One of the great ironies: Andy and his colleague Mickey (Ron Cropper), so passionate about the study of the universe, study its mysteries through never-ending flows of numbers on a computer screen.

Magic is a stunning play, the kind that can shake you to your core when it gets the production it deserves.

IF falls short, despite the terrific Mohlenhoff in her best performance of the current season. She inhabits Barbara, whose conflicts as artist, lover, daughter, sister and even expectant mother throw her life into turmoil.

Pyle, invariably a good acting partner for her, is good but not quite good enough. Or actually too good, or at least too nice. We need more hints of what's swirling and boiling deep inside Andy. We need to be surprised but not to wonder, "where did that come from?"

Overcoming obstacles

Cincinnati's smaller companies share a common problem, and Magic falls victim to it. Increase the size of a cast beyond a handful and the ensemble loses quality. Too many of the cast will be "acting" rather than finding a way to make the characters come to life through them.

Wilson, at his best, is a playwright you have to feel to your soul.

The Xavier rehearsal space is bare bones, and Ed Cohen, doing double duty as director and production designer, opts to cleverly surround the audience with a series of black panels. The ensemble orbits around the outside to make their entrances and exits. It's both intimate and disconcerting, watching actors squeeze through skinny spaces.

While budget issues clearly have inspired choices, Magic is too minimalist, just a collection of black boxes on the small playing space. We need to feel the universe Wilson uses as such a vital allegory. Slide projections might have been an option.

Sympathetic Magic, through May 25, IF Theatre Collective, Gallagher Student Center studio. 745-3939.