Theatre in Review: The Picture Box (Negro Ensemble Company/Theatre Row)Did you ever go through the family albums of someone you don't really know? Not much fun, was it? That's the experience I had watching The Picture Box, an 80-minute trip down memory lane for some very thinly drawn characters. The action is set in an empty house on an island in or near Lake Worth, Florida. Carrie, a 40-ish New Yorker, is shutting down the home where she grew up, following the death of her mother. The playwright, Cate Ryan, wastes no time in establishing that the much-married and weak-willed deceased wasn't much of a presence in her daughter's life. The role of parents fell to Mackie, the black houseman, and his wife, Josephine. Now, as she is about to complete the sale of the house, Carrie produces a box of photos that her mother left behind for Mackie. And, for 90% of The Picture Box's short running time, the two of them, and Josephine, sit around, whiling away the hours looking at snapshots and remembering the good times. To say this is less than compelling is to make the understatement of the year. For one thing, the dialogue is filled with clunky exposition, stating the obvious to fill in the audience. "I know who this is," says Carrie. "It's your son, Edward. He taught me to ride a bike." Much of it is drearily sentimental; a story about a runaway dog cues Carrie to look into the middle distance and announce, "I've been looking for Chips ever since." And, whenever there's a lull, which is often, she hugs either Mackie or Josephine and says something like, "You're my real family." We hear about some long-ago tragedies, including Mackie's first two marriages and his son's life sentence to prison, but there's nothing to cut through the feeling of inertia. The one discordant note is struck by Bob and Karen, the couple who are buying the house. A pair of grasping, racist gargoyles from Michigan, they don't even achieve cartoon status. "The black neighborhood is right across the bridge; it's like Soweto out there," says Bob. A few minutes later, as if it's 1965 and he's buying a house in Watts, he adds, "The only thing that keeps the blacks from looting the neighborhood is that bridge." Under the circumstances, you won't be surprised to hear that a certain word beginning with N will soon be uttered, leaving us presumably shocked beyond description. Ryan makes sure we understand that Bob and Karen are unhappily married, implicitly suggesting that racists are lousy lovers. As if The Picture Box needed an additional note of self-congratulation, the play unfolds on the day of the 2008 election. Carrie, Mackie, and Josephine keep asking each other who they're voting for -- as if they are about to start a caucus for John McCain. In contrast, Bob sneers, "Hope and change. He hopes to get my change." (The script also condemns them for wanting to renovate the house to their satisfaction, as if there's something wrong with them for not treating it as a temple of revered memories.) Surprisingly, Arthur French's Mackie emerges as a fully dimensional character. Whether he's neatly palming a photo of his second wife, keeping it out of Josephine's view, or trembling with rage at his son's fate, you have a sense of his long and rich history. Otherwise, Jennifer Van Dyck and Elain Graham, as Carrie and Josephine, both good actresses, are stymied by the script's plastic, prefabricated notions. As Bob and Karen, Malachy Cleary and Marisa Redanty ham it up shamelessly, something the director, Charles Weldon, seems to have encouraged them to do. The production design, including Patrice Davison's set (an empty room painted in Florida pastels), Mark R. Caswell's costumes, and Fémi Sarah Heggie's sound, are all acceptable. Considering there's a big picture window on the fourth wall, and the action covers much of a day, there's surprisingly little or no change in Ves Weaver's lighting. Slow, sentimental, and dramatically slack, The Picture Box is a strange choice for the Negro Ensemble Company -- a play in which the worth of a black couple is measured in how beautifully they nurtured a white family. The people behind it need to get out more -- maybe to a screening of The Help.--David Barbour 
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