Performing Arts

Even if you don't care a hoot about theater, go see Core Performance Manufactory's double bill of Archibald MacLeish plays just to hear the original score, partly improvised on the spot.

CHERYL DIAZ MEYER/DMN

Carolyn Wickwire (with Garrett Schenck) has strong scenes in This Music Crept by Me Upon the Waters.

Kim Corbet and Floyd Kearns-Simmons occupy a space beside the Bath House Cultural Center stage big enough for a small orchestra and make sounds throughout the evening. In the curtain raiser, Air Raid, they create a harrowing aerial attack mostly with percussion and a trombone. For This Music Crept by Me Upon the Waters, they envelop the action in a hundred different tints – a rock 'n' roll introduction, sounds of ocean and wind, fragments of cocktail music.

This tour de force is one of the most striking design elements ever seen on a Dallas stage.

Of course, if you do like theater, these shows have a great deal to offer in that department as well. Core boss Elizabeth Ware had already staged Air Raid for last summer's Festival of Independent Theatres. Inspired by Picasso's huge painting Guernica, this piece about the 20th-century shift in warfare from combat between professionals to attacks on civilian populations has grown in depth and assurance.

But it's This Music Crept by Me Upon the Waters, which premiered Wednesday, that will make everybody glad that Core has resumed full-scale productions after a hiatus of several years.

The long first scene gives us a brilliant quartet of actors assembling for a dinner party and becoming transfixed by moonrise on a tropical island. Elizabeth (Shannon Kearns-Simmons) finds transcendental meaning in just being in this island paradise, while her intensely practical husband Chuck (Jack O'Donnell) grows increasingly frustrated by what he considers her naïve romanticism.

Their first two guests grow hungrier by the minute as they wait for the rest to arrive. As Alice, Maryam Baig throws her eyes about with sophisticated glee. The real find here, though, is Kent Williams, who makes Alice's husband Oliver into a superannuated but still witty Puck.

When the stragglers finally arrive, Carolyn Wickwire has some strong scenes in which she is caught between her own lunar inspirations and an almost violent husband. The long-awaited entrance of David, with whom Elizabeth has something of a history, is a bust, sadly, because Steven Baker can't quite bring off Mr. MacLeish's poetic flights of language with as much lyric conviction as some of his fellow cast members.

J. Christopher Campbell's lighting design also helps bring the playwright's island paradise to life. With the kind of artistry that keeps popping up in the Bath House these days, it's hard to remember that it once had to live down a reputation as a poor environment for designers.

E-mail ltaitte@dallasnews.com

Through Jan. 27 at the Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther at White Rock Lake. Runs 90 mins. $12 to $20. 214-893-3009, www.core performancemanufactory.com.