It would be difficult to find a cast more committed to a play than the four people performing The Pull of Negative Gravity at Mosaic Theater, and it would probably be as difficult to find staging so ably in support of a work. So it's disheartening that the play itself isn't more committed to its heartfelt, angry task of exploring the damage wrought on the body of a soldier wounded in Iraq in the present conflict and to his family's emotional equilibrium upon his return to Wales.
Playwright Jonathan Lichtenstein too often seems to rely on contradictions and vagueness to create points of discussion. The story: One brother, Dai (it's pronounced "die) goes to war. The other brother, Rhys, stays on the dying farm with his widowed mother and Dai's fiancee, Bethan, a frequent visitor because she misses Dai so much. She also is attracted to Rhys, and the attraction sometimes is mutual. A wounded Dai returns a few months later, and the damage is much worse than the family expected.
The tale is told in scenes that take place in the past, the present, and in the imagination. Michael Baugh as Dai and Claire Tyler as Bethan rise to their physically demanding roles -- Baugh because Dai has lost the use of three limbs and much of the abillity to speak, Tyler because her character is weepy and needy and desperate and exuberant, swinging between polar opposites with only the occasional moment of believable compassion; she's a nurse in a hospital treating the war wounded. That the whole thing doesn't collapse into melodrama is a testament to their talent and that of Elizabeth Dimon as the mother, Vi (like the Latin for "life"), and Todd Allen Durkin as Rhys, the brother who knows he's last in line for his mother's affection. Those characters are complicated but operate within narrower boundaries than the other two.
Richard Jay Simon, Mosaic's executive artistic director, bumped M. Butterfly as the fourth-season finale to mount this topical, if exasperating, play as a co-national premier (New York's 59E59 beat him to opening night by a few days). Simon directs the play with a sensitive touch and a good eye. The usual proscenium stage is wrenched into two playing areas at right angles, separated by audience seating. One is the kitchen and a bit of the living room of the farm, one is a hilltop where the brothers hike and Bethan dances wildly as a Chinook helicopter flies overhead on its way to the hospital. (The title derives from a phenomenon in the helicopter, and Lichtenstein sprinkles the text with references to birds.) Good work by sound designer Tracy Almeida on the chopper's approach and fly-by. Full marks as well to Rich Simone for the realistic environments, to Travis Neff for the sky-blue cyclorama above the hill and to Meredith Lasher for again putting actors into costumes that look like real clothes. It's the play that turns false, that seems to confuse moral ambiguity and food for thought with vague and contradictory plot points. Much is made, for example, of the brothers tossing a coin -- best of five to decide who goes first, then best of 15 to decide who wins. But what does the first to eighth win: the right to go to war or to stay home? And does the random luck of the coin toss matter at all, or is it actually Vi who decides? 
