Kevin Bacon is an extremely popular movie star (36 films are credited in the playbill). He is also half of the much publicized musical group, The Bacon Brothers, and is currently all over the tube in at least two highly-visible commercials, one promoting New York, another Visa. This is also his eighth listed appearance onstage. Those credits alone are enough of a draw to fill a large Broadway theater, and the Roundabout Theater Company must be very aware of all this.
Even without all that, Bacon is a joy to watch. He fills the first minutes of this atmospheric piece by Heather McDonald with bits if stage business, establishing his character wordlessly through body language as homespun as his costume and character, the aptly-named Samuel Gentle. While the solo evening is an obvious ego trip for Mr. Bacon, one cannot say he is vain. Michael Krass has put him in a shapeless corduroy suit, bespectacled, tramping through Mark Wendland's dirt-filled stage.
The opening few moments play in silence as he putters and ponders nothing less than one man's life journey in quest of his idea of G-d which seems, in this play, to be shaped by environmental circumstances. The author tries to endow the amorphous piece with a structure of sorts, delineating Gentle's search for a definition into four points. Each contact with G-d is preceded by the same environmental sequence, "a fierce blue sky, electrically-charged atmosphere" ... "a clear, fierce blue light, everything shimmered."
The text of An Almost Holy Picture opens when a young, impressionable boy and his father hear the voice of G-d calling "Follow Me" (moment One), and indeed he becomes a minister in a desert parish. But a devastating bus accident during which nine children in his care died caused him to forsake his calling, his relationship with G-d becoming abusive: "I abuse him and he abuses me"(moment Two).
Moment Three is the birth of his daughter, an occasion of such joy that "my ribcage expanded to make room for my heart." But she is imperfect, born with an hereditary defect which produces hair all over her body, from which he tries to shield her throughout her young life. "A father's love can be a highly distracting thing... if G-d is only giving us the burdens we can bear, I have seen Him miscalculate."
It is not until the very last minutes of an arduous night of theater that the meaning of the title of this long, meandering journey unfolds. But even in retrospect, the pieces do not align in any one direction. Director Michael Mayer does little to mitigate the obscurity. In the end, it is nothing more profound than a father's love for his not-quite-perfect daughter. At nine, during the summer when her bi-weekly body shaving was abandoned, the troubled teenage son of a friend photographed her, and those pictures were the subjects of an exhibition. Through his resultant fury, Gentle inadvertently creates the very stigma for his daughter from which he tried so hard to protect her, and a gap develops between them. "I am the one who made you cover yourself in shame," instead of protecting her, "I was the one who showed her how ugly she is to the world." Later on, it is the discovery of the artistry in one of those pictures that encases her in a sparkling halo of light that is his salvation. Moment Four.
Kevin Bacon is excellent in delivering the author's beautiful descriptive phrases, painting verbal emotions in terms of color, light and nature. Plagued by inconsistencies and meanderings, the long-overdue end results in little more than a pretentious forced march by his fans whose curiosity might have been satiated within the first fifteen minutes.
"It is a romantic notion that tragedy binds people together" ... "it is loss which defines us" is, one assumes, the salient point of the evening as it resonates with the 9/11 tragedy. One is "always waiting for that ...expected something that will change everything." Well, so are we, and it never comes.
