By Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll

Island living isn't so easy in 'Pantomime'

TRURO - And you thought you were enjoying a Cape Cod summer. Nope, once inside the tent at Payomet Performing Arts Center, your beachside retreat is in the Caribbean.

The mood begins before the show with calypso music, and there's something about a few lawn chairs, bamboo screens, strategically placed rocks and palm trees on stage that's enough to carry out the theme quite nicely.

The setting is important to explain the title of Derek Walcott's "Pantomime," which doesn't refer to the Marcel Marceau variety but instead a British-influenced type of stylized, generally light-hearted, yet moral-teaching entertainment enjoyed at Christmastime in the islands.

But Walcott's play, in its Cape premiere, is no light, joyous comedy. While there are certainly fun and funny scenes - chiefly from Gustave Johnson's exuberant, high-spirited, life-embracing portrayal of maintenance man Jackson Phillip - there are also serious themes and tragic moments explored in this two-man script.

Harry Trewe, a former music hall entertainer, has fled family grief in England to a lonely existence in Tobago and sunk everything he has into a seaside hotel. He has promised entertainment in his brochures, so as the tourist season nears, he devises a pantomime based on "Robinson Crusoe." He recruits employee Jackson, a former musician, to take on the second role. Jackson at first wants nothing to do with it, then jumps in so wholeheartedly that Harry is taken aback by what their play could portray in the post-imperialist Caribbean.

The pair experiment with reversing roles - with, at times, the black man becoming Crusoe, and the white man playing the cannibal native Man Friday that Crusoe finds when he shipwrecks on an island. Through the plans to stage the play, the two explore race relations, post-colonial politics and the ideas of independence and slavery, as well as classic theater versus improvisation and how to deal with grief.

Jackson's style is outsized and in-your-face. Harry is largely the more repressed, reserved British temperament.

Walcott's language is fluid and intelligent, but the thought-provoking parrying is told in a series of scenes that go back and forth frequently in how the characters are feeling about their enterprise and each other.

Vernice Miller's supple direction offers big moments and lively interplay, but the characters' changes are sometimes so abrupt and unexplained that it's hard to keep up with the mood and emotional temperature.

One minute, Jackson wants little to do with the panto, the next he's moving furniture and delving into the character. He wants a serious theme, as evidenced by Johnson's tour de force swimming-to-the-island scene, then he's making fun of it all. Tom Wolfson's Harry is particularly troubling. While he's engaging in early comic scenes and gripping in later tragic ones, Wolfson spends much of the play looking passive, uncomfortable at Jackson's antics and conflicted, without getting across exactly what those conflicts are.

Friday night's performance was a preview of the show's four-weekend run, so there's time for all, particularly Wolfson, to more fully define the characters.

Walcott, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature, who was raised and spent much of his life in the Caribbean, writes with passion of the cultural repercussions of the area's history. In 1978's "Pantomine," he offers an insightful, often entertaining, if sometimes muddled look at race relations that Payomet has recognized still has meaning today.