We Review: By the Waters of Babylon @ the Seattle Rep

In the westerns we read growing up, cowboys were always punching each other right in the solar plexus. A scene in the lonelyhearts drama By the Waters of Babylon did that to the Seattle Rep audience last night, leaving people gasping and in tears. It was a lucky punch, though -- most of the time the play telegraphs exactly what's coming next: quips and tedium.

If you go, go for Suzanne Bouchard's outstanding performance as a feral alcoholic widow. You won't see better acting in Seattle. (Also, thanks to design team Michael Ganio, Frances Kenny, York Kennedy, and Christopher Walker, the sights and sounds of a Texas summer day have never seemed so real to us.)

If you've seen Bouchard before, you've probably seen her as some willowy, dripping-with-silk, tart-tongued beauty in a Coward or Wilde play. Here, she's gone another way. Her Catherine hires the Cuban Arturo (Armando Durán) to deal with the overgrown garden at her place in Austin, but she's as interested in company as getting the weeding done. Holding her drink like an umbrella against the sky falling, Bouchard hits the On switch to Catherine's interior monologue, and the jokes, childhood tales, come-ons, and scathing self-appraisals pour out. We can't list every little thing -- the clenched jaw, sideways sidebars, snorts, jumpiness -- but the effect is magnetic.

Durán's Arturo gets the short end of the stick -- he's a Cuban exile with poor self-esteem and a backstory straight out of the tortured artist's handbook. Durán lends him a dignity that keeps him from becoming maudlin, but there's no escaping the fact that playwright Schenkkan is using Arturo to deliver a Cuban history lecture. By the intermission (the show runs two hours), Arturo has just come clean about his shameful past, so we know we have Catherine's exposé to look forward to.

Even so, Bouchard's self-immolating scene rocks us -- we don't want to spoil anything so we won't go into the gory details. But what happens exposes the flawed set-up.

If this were a couple with a history, instead of two people who have just met, how it all turns out might work. Instead, we are reminded of how once, on a second date, a woman started telling us about her abortion...and how certain we were that that was not a second-date topic. With that in mind, we're in no mood for the play's "transformative" finale, a magical realist catharsis that sucks all the hopped-up, messy, neurotic reality off the stage in favor of oh-so-pretty, affirmation-poster visuals. In our rewrite, Catherine is led off in handcuffs, and we next see Arturo in a bar, telling someone, "Holy shit, that was a close one."

Photos: Suzanne Bouchard as Catherine and Armando Duran as Arturo in Robert Schenkkan’s By the Waters of Babylon. At Seattle Repertory Theatre through March 2, 2008. Photos © Chris Bennion, 2008.