Stage Review: A dark and revealing home in 'Holler'

It's a dangerous place, this backwoods holler of bloody secrets and dark desires, populated with the bumbling, the greedy and the emotionally needy -- unhappy folks really rather like you and me.

This place is the mind of David Turkel, a young man with a taste for the macabre and, on the evidence of two plays produced here by Bricolage, a playwright (and director) with the distinctive writing skills to spin his musings into a taut and intriguing yarn.

The first play was "Wild Signs," an epic investigation of vampire lore that merged unfamiliar parts of the legendary background, lurid personal interactions and some crackling dialogue. Bricolage gave it ambitious size and edge by staging it in an abandoned church in Highland Park.

Now, in "Holler," Turkel brings his fascination for the dark and the wayward closer to home -- his home, in that this native southerner has set the play in a hamlet in southwestern West Virginia, but also our home, because, as I say, the scary and violent goings-on have more of us in them than we might immediately recognize. By staging it at the Brew House, Bricolage gives it added immediacy.

Initially, "Holler" may encourage a city audience to feel distant and superior. It starts with the brilliant set by Robert Hirst, who must have had lots of help to create this panorama of a 30-foot trailer plus truck and the kind of debris you often see in backwoods yards. Well, these are backwoods folks, their accents (authentic to the region, I'm told) sometimes so thick that they're barely intelligible to a Northern ear.

But in spite of the explosive mysteries in the background and the gut-wrenching denouement, "Holler" earns its humanity because Turkel obviously cares for his characters, not just Joe and Myra, the two pitiable, mentally challenged young people, but especially Bill, Joe's earnest if somewhat hapless brother. I think you can also see sparks of common humanity in frantic, strung-out Carson and stolid cop Vernon, and maybe, if you look really close, even in sadistic Paris.

Certainly any parent can identify with Bill, played by Bricolage artistic director Jeffrey Carpenter with a full measure of burly desperation. He so wants to do the right thing, from his klunky blunder of showing Myra a Playboy centerfold to the outrageous dark comedy of throwing an apologetic feast for Myra and Joe, complete with highfalutin' language.

Reality intrudes, however, in the form of some shady deal in Bill's recent past. There's a pal who might squeal, a suitcase full of money, the cop he's known all his life and Myra's father to deal with, too. For all his eccentricity, Bill is a decent sort, and Carpenter has a genius for letting us glimpse the sympathetic center within the grotesque.

The two kids (mentally kids, at least) are in the capable hands of Greg Coughlin and Elena Passarello. They don't have to do much to touch our hearts, and they show the necessary restraint. Myra's affectless rush of words is hard to decipher, but I don't think anything significant is lost.

Dereck Walton also shows restraint as Carson, who could have turned into caricature, and Daryl Fleming's Vernon has a believable decency. Terry Parshall's Paris is an impressive heavy, in both senses. His accent is the most difficult but apparently the most authentic.

Brad Peterson's sound design adds mightily to the atmosphere, from the carefully chosen pop music to the dog barks and sounds of nature that seem to turn the Brew House into what it represents. The set is one of the most impressive I've seen in a long time. When the entire wall of the trailer rises soundlessly to reveal its innards, you have a vivid image of the play's revelation of its characters' inner lives.

"Holler" knows its own destination and takes 100 unhurried minutes to get there. It's not pretty, but it enthralls. Director Turkel does his script proud.