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REVIEW OSF's `Magic Fire' is powerful Playwright's love of her characters strengthens story By LLOYD ROSE The Washington Post EDITOR'S NOTE: A special Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of "The Magic Fire" opened its public run Thursday night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. This is a review of the production from The Washington Post. WASHINGTON -- "We don't say "Franco' at the dinner table, darling," the very proper upper-middle-class Amalia Berg (Demetra Pittman) admonishes her little girl, Lise (Alyn McKenna Bartell), in "The Magic Fire." The adult Lise (Vilma Silva) is telling us her story in this nostalgic yet searingly powerful play, which opened Thursday night at the Kennedy Center. Her purpose, and that of playwright Lillian Garrett-Groag, is to try to recover the truth of the childhood world she remembers so fondly. That world happens to be Buenos Aires in 1952, where Lise's parents live -- and her extended family often gathers -- in a gracious, high-ceilinged apartment filled with vases of fresh flowers and the sound of opera recordings. Lise is the product of the marriage of two immigrant families, one Italian, one Austrian, who fled fascist Europe for a new life in Latin America, bringing with them all the haute bourgeois elements of their old life: the gentility, the love of art, the respect for learning, the too-comfortable chairs. They draw these things around them like curtains, to shade them from the violent reality of Peron's Argentina. "The Magic Fire" begins as a simple memory play. We meet the enjoyably eccentric family -- great-grandmother Guarini (Eileen DiSandre), who has refused to know a moment's happiness since she left Italy; crazy Aunt Paula (Dee Maaske), who tells inappropriate stories about family suicides at the supper table; Lise's father, bookish, gentle Otto (Anthony Heald); refined, courageous Aunt Clara (Catherine E. Coulson). They're vital, likable people, and Lise/Garrett-Groag clearly loves them. It's a shock to realize slowly that they're morally inadequate to their situation. Sometimes Garrett-Groag's writing, though skillful and funny, is middlebrow. People have too-poetic speeches and unconvincingly insightful revelations. Some of the characters, such as a liberal newspaper editor (Michael J. Hume) who wants the family to get its head out of the sand, are cliches. But Garrett-Groag isn't a sentimental writer, and even when she makes an obvious choice she never fulfills it obviously. And in a second-act dinner party scene, in which the family, with innocent egotism, falls in love with its own attempts at heroism, the play approaches the rueful, compassionate, condemning level of Chekhov. "The Magic Fire's" considerable and wrenching power comes from the playwright's fondness for the characters. Most plays that criticize the political myopia of the middle class are shrilly hectoring. Garrett-Groag approaches the characters tenderly, wanting almost as much as they to maintain their illusions, and as a result the revelation of their weaknesses is excruciating. The rather complicated narrative, in which the adult Lise slips into and out of the past, sometimes noticed by the family, sometimes not, is kept moving lightly by director Libby Appel. The cast -- with the exception of Richard Howard, who seems a little unsure as the fascist-from-across-the-hall -- is excellent. Richard L. Hay's richly upholstered set hints that a haven can also be a prison, and Deborah M. Dryden's '50s costumes are elegantly subtle. Though it moves quickly and entertainingly, the play is too long. There's more story than is needed to make the point. And it's unfortunate that the dinner scene comes more or less in the middle. After that tour de force, "The Magic Fire" is emotionally and thematically over, even if there's story left to tell. Still, it hits home with the disturbing accuracy of a Shaw play. The ultra-civilized Bergs, with their opera at home and nights out at the theater, are exactly the sort of people who would flock to a new play like this at the Kennedy Center. They're sitting next to us. They are us. (The Magic Fire, by Lillian Garrett-Groag, continues at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater through Dec. 6. For tickets, call 202-467-4600.) Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA