Swinging through reality

At the most transfixing moment of Warren Leight's play Side Man, all eyes are glued on a small cassette player. Then comes the wrenching riff of young trumpet soloist Clifford Brown, a recording made the night before his death in an auto accident. The actors vanish: transported into the rapture of their characters, they listen in utter oblivion. Here is the ecstasy of jazz, the spell of Side Man, and the triumph of this performance.

LIZ ARCHIBALD/YH Scenes from a slightly dingy Italian restaurant.

Brief moments like this one take place when the actors come together with the sensitivity and pacing that create the rhythm of this play's memory collage, as arranged by narrator Cliff, the son of a so-called "side man" (a backup player for jazz bands). Wondering why he was born at all, Cliff takes the audience through the rifts in his life, in the relations of his parents and in their realms of grim reality and harmonious escapism. His father Gene and his long-time cronies are '50s hipsters and slaves to a common obsession: jazz. As they eventually wake to find themselves "in the twilight of a mediocre career," Cliff's mother, "crazy" Terry, descends simultaneously into an addictive despair of her own. Because the stories are all related in the shifting spotlights of Cliff's memory, the actors must manage difficult transitions in time and reality. Terry is especially adept in several quick shifts in age and context. As a waitress with a hyperactive libido, Maria Oliveras, MC '01, is invariably dynamic. Somewhat troublesome is Cliff's transition into his younger self—his immediate flip from wry adult commentary to skipping boyhood is a bit too drastic. But most cumbersome here is the set: awkwardly spanned out, it often places the actors too far from the audience. The excessive knick-knacks are distracting and out-of-place in what is fundamentally an expressionistic piece.

Nevertheless, the performances are forceful and the dissonances resonate: "When he's up there, blowing, he's totally in touch with everything that's going on around him," Cliff reflects on his father. "I used to wonder how he could sense everything while he was blowing, and almost nothing when he wasn't." Swinging in reality, this kind of jazz is more an existence than a livelihood.

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