PLANC PRODUCTIONS - AMBROSE BIERCE

In 1914 Ambrose Bierce vanished into the Mexican countryside leaving no trace of his whereabouts. We are left with only rumors and conjecture as to Bierce's real fate. However, for the next few weeks you can catch a glimpse of the infamous writer at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, in an imagined interlude before he walks into history.
_The Unicorn Theatre premiere of "Ambrose Bierce" brings to a close what local playwright Rob Foster calls his "compulsive fascination" with this complicated figure, his life and work.
_The fruit of Foster's compulsion is a thoughtful, dramatically coherent script that testifies to his solid grasp of Biersian issues and style. Foster condenses his tale into two acts that run well under two hours with intermission.
_Ambrose Bierce is easily one of the most enigmatic and complex men in American literary history. His life was made more compelling, by an order of magnitude, through his mysterious disappearance in Mexico, an episode that continues to quicken the imaginations of those who fall under his spell.
_A brief biography of Bierce states he was born in 1842 Ohio, fought in the Civil War, prospected for gold, worked as a journalist for William Randolph Hearst, went on to author short stories of historical and macabre fiction, then poof!
_His most famous works are "The Devil's Dictionary" and the short Civil War story "Incident At Owl Creek Bridge."
_Longer biographies are still being written, by those keen to decipher Bierce's inscrutable nature. Brilliant master of invective, spinner of weird tales and voluminous essayist, critic, humorist, poet and commentator on the human

condition, Bierce remains an enigmatic personage—wizard, madman, cynic, who cloaked himself in ultimate mystery, by one day vanishing without even a death certificate.
_Foster gives a kind of gift to those who have drunk from the deep, strange well of Ambrose Bierce by confessing in his program notes that this play "is about closure," and end to the compulsion without losing admiration for the man himself.
_For that is the gnarly conundrum of Bierce. He stays a prickly, unresolved phenomenon, a puzzle to be solved. He's a gritty old coot who hints broadly that he knows a lot more than he's telling. And, once hooked, it isn't easy letting go of him. Foster shows how to unhook in an elegant manner in his distillation of Bierce.
_Foster calls his play "a serio-comic speculation based on the legends and writing" of Bierce. The location is a house of prostitution where Hearst's war correspondent, William Brand, finds the "macabre poet" who seems determined to stay in harm's way amidst rebels and federalés shooting it out in Mexico.
_The other who makes his way to the hideaway is Albert Bierce Vuros, Bierce's minister cousin who urgently pressures him to leave with them to safety. The fourth member of the cast is the proprietress of the brothel, whom Bierce refers to as "Madam Butterfly."
_Though Brand–dished up with amusing self-importance by Ron Cohen–leaves "the doomed lunatic to his inevitable fate," the cousin stays on for a blistering verbal fight with his intransigent relative. The heart of the tale lies in the intriguing and ferocious duel between the two Bierces; the cynic and the cleric.
_Foster has written exciting, satisfying dialogue here. The scene seems overshadowed by a Biercian muse. They drink sangria, and play a wicked game of Russian roulette at Bierce's insistence with his black metal Smith & Wesson revolver.
_Fears are challenged on both sides. A fierceness shows itself in the man of God as well as the man of the devil. For a moment Bierce relents.
_A brilliant moment in the play comes at the height of the cousins' literal and psychological spin-the-bullet showdown when Vuros yells at Bierce, "You are afraid of being figured out!"
_Perhaps Foster is right. Bierce's biggest buggaboo may have been fear of being ordinary, of losing his mystery. Might even be worth vanishing whole to prevent that.
_Thomas Burks takes the role of Bierce in a performance that hits and misses. He looks like Bierce with his great shock of white hair, the craggy face and wiry frame. He also adopts a seething intensity in his portrayal that seems fitting.
_Burks gives us this bitter, cynical man non-stop, but uses a naturalistic, mumbling cowboy style of speech delivery

that, alas, doesn't work well for this role.
_Bierce was, above all, a man of words, a brilliant user of the English language. In a theatre piece, we want to hear this brilliance with robust clarity, especially since Foster puts so much pure Bierce into the dialogue.
_Jody Gilmore hands in a valiant portrayal of cousin Albert; he gets stronger as the play unfolds. There may have been some missed potential in the Bierce-on-Bierce scene, though both actors portrayed the passions involved.
_Yvonne Arias, as the brothel madam, flitted in and out, speaking English and a lot of feisty Spanish, perhaps too much for those who do not know the language. She seemed more like a boarding house proprietor than a merchant of sex, but then, that is from one who has never set foot in a Mexican brothel.
_The setting was surprisingly romantic, with vivid murals on pink walls, garnished by attractive rustic decor–an atmosphere that bore the distinctive genius of Art Director Carey Crockett. In the first act a beautiful full moon shown through a central window, and in the second act, the window looked out onto a tender dawn scene.
_Bierce's writing corner paired a typewriter with the choice touch of a human skull atop a stack of books–and in the skull's eye socket, a dried rose from a collection of similar roses surrounding a small statuette of the Blessed Virgin in the opposing corner.
_Foster leaves us with the "Abracadabra" entry in the Devil's Dictionary, a poem that well sums up the occult like mystery surrounding Bierce. What a fascinating man!
_Foster can spin and direct a good yarn too.