The latest disappointment imported from overseas, Marie Jones' Stones in His Pockets is a play that dares to blast the opinion that smaller and more efficient is better, having two actors fill the roles of a cast of nearly fifteen. The set-up is: two extras, Jake (Sean Campion) and Charlie (Conleth Hill), find work on an Irish film set where a new picture is being shot, complete with order-barking director, a vain, accent-challenged ingenue; an overzealous production assistant and various others who pop in and out of the story. Basically, your average Miramax film dropped onto a Broadway stage. Pockets would have been far more enjoyable if Jones or director Ian McElhinney had really gone after their targets like growling dogs. Campion and Hill are engaging, resourceful performers, but their characters are obvious and unoriginal, and the play has a benign follow-through. Jones is very obviously after American movies' exploitation of the richness of Ireland and its citizens, and it's a good sharp target. I couldn't help but think that the self-impressed American actress (humorously embodied by Hill) is a tad resemblent of a toothy, very recent Oscar winner who dabbled in a few Irish-themed pictures in the mid-1990s. But this characterization, like several others, lacks bite. It tells us too many things we already know about American actors who can't nail accents and exploit the good natures of those around them.
The play is too gentle to fully dismiss but too slight to give a pass. And despite how it may sound, this show is just a little too small for Broadway. I'm not sure that winning Oliviers overseas should always equal a Great White Way transfer. The production calls out for intimacy, so you can really capture the leaps in and out character by the two talented leads. But at the John Golden Theater, the play achieves a hazy indistinctness that noticeably had several audience members bolting for the exits before Act One had even closed. I don't condone such behavior, but it points to a lack of grandeur on the part of the makers. It doesn't have to wow the crowd with fancy sets and costumes (the play is very skimpy on those fronts), but countless Off-Broadway shows have gone even further with similar material.
