THEATER

Mud is mildly top-heavy, but what's a guy gonna do?

You have to dig about 12 and a half feet to find it, but there's something downright noble about hapless, dimwitted little Mae. She's not much to look at as her mid-30s approach, she lives in a house the size of a tie tack and she doesn't have two quarters to her sorry name, yet she manages to hang on to hope and the innumerable gifts it brings. The thing is that she loves to learn, and learn about everything, from the regenerative powers of starfish to her own capacity for sex and love.

Small-town 1930s America, it seems, has yet to uncover at least one rare and interminably unpolished gem.

Mud, the good current entry from the scrappy Ion Theatre Company, champions Mae's hunger for promise in her life, and it throws one insurmountable obstacle-the repressed, slow-thinking, resentful Lloyd-in her path. The two have lived together for years, and the arrangement fuels Lloyd's sense of entitlement in the household. Playwright Maria Irene Fornés darkly and cunningly exploits that familiarity, letting the text's little things speak for themselves. Outside of a major directorial question, Ion has done her proud as it incubates a tradition of giving voice to society's voiceless.

Mae (Julie Sachs) is studying math and learning how to read. She's always up for a roll in the intellectual hay, like the one she takes with Henry (Glenn Paris), her somewhat smarter, mildly condescending neighbor. Henry's brains are his ticket to membership in Mae's household, to Lloyd's (Claudio Raygoza, who also directs) deep chagrin. The friction fuels Mae's resolve to leave the home and forge a better world for herself. That strategy would be one of her last.

From the start, director Raygoza picks up on Fornés' situational, innocuous textures. Much is made, for example, of the housework Mae is tasked with. She irons Lloyd's trousers obsessively, as if the repetition will transport her outside those four dowdy walls. Her chores, along with Lloyd's stubborn prostate condition and Henry's incapacitation after a fall, are metaphors for the hands these people have been dealt and their desperation to exchange the cards for a new deck. Raygoza paints this piece with the overstated pauses, lengthy silences and tremulous interactions that underscore trio's despair. Realistically, the situations are tough to contemplate. Theatrically, they're a joy to watch.

But those who direct and act in the same show are scaling a slippery slope. While Raygoza did find a second set of eyes in assistant helmer Sara Beth Morgan, he can't necessarily detect a directorial misstep amid his duties as a performer. Lloyd should be maniacally elated at Henry's post-accident paralysis. How does he show his ecstasy over his nemesis' plight? He feeds him! Pour the slop down Henry's pants; taunt him at every single moment about his condition; choke him with the ladle; do anything and everything to exact blind revenge on the interloper. Otherwise, Lloyd's characterizations peak too early, leaving the show with a mildly top-heavy feel. If Raygoza didn't see the opening for that crucial bit of development, Morgan or Fornés should have.

But whaddya gonna do? Raygoza-who also designed the physical settings-is a smart, thoughtful, indispensable force behind Ion, which, thank God, has survived last year's displacement from downtown's defunct New World Stage venue. Sachs' Mae nicely straddles a line between the visceral and the inspirational, and Paris is a solid, ironical Henry. Mud is worth the time-it's a spectral, earnest entry from a group that nearly always lands on its feet no matter where it performs.

This review is based on the opening-night performance of March 9. Mud runs through March 25 at the Academy of Performing Arts, 4580-B Alvarado Canyon Road. $14-$22. 619-374-6894.

The more things change...

Electricidad is writer Luis Alfaro's adaptation of Sophocles' Electra, and it's built kind of the same way West Side Story feeds off Romeo and Juliet. Literarily, the modern pieces capture the ideas behind the two classics-and in the case of San Diego State University's current Electricidad, director Peter Cirino also styles the physical presentation after theatrical conventions popular in Sophocles' day.

Just as Electra 2,500 years before her, Electricidad (Andrea Galvez) is consumed by the murder of her father and the revenge she seeks-only this time, the action is set in the steamy barrios of East L.A. instead of on an ancient Grecian battlefield. In Cirino's hands, the text is a gritty, crafty story about street justice, replete with a gang-banger “chorus” that comments on the action. Some may object to Galvez's unceasing angst amid her grief (poor thing must be exhausted by now)-but that's how the Greeks got things to project in their huge outdoor theaters. It works here, too, and pretty darn well.

Electricidad runs through March 18 at SDSU's experimental space at the rear of the Don Powell Theatre. $13-$15. 619-594-6884.

Write to marty@SDcitybeat.com and editor@SDcitybeat.com.