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Berkeley’s Speakeasy Theater opened a pretty good grassroots stage production last weekend of Lyle Kessler’s 1983 gangster tale “Orphans.” This stage play was the source for Kessler’s somewhat reworked 1987 movie of the same title starring Albert Finney and Matthew Modine. 

As a stage play, “Orphans” is an existential, three-character, one-room thugs drama, obviously influenced in its creation by the threatening, elliptical writing styles and ideas of Harold Pinter and David Mamet. 

Set in an unprosperous part of present day Philadelphia, and told in eight or ten scenes over two acts, “Orphans” is the story of two marginal brothers surviving on the edge of society in their dead mother’s rundown family house. When the brothers reluctantly befriend a mysterious older stranger, all three lives change forever. 

To put food on the table and pay his bar bill, small time stick-up hoodlum Treat (Raul Rubio) supports himself and his developmentally retarded brother Phillip (Bruce Kaplan) by committing holdups on the street, taking wallets and fencing jewelry. 

This petty gangster character of Treat seems taken right out of Mamet’s first huge stage success “American Buffalo” where, in fact, the principal petty gangster goes by the similar name of Teach. 

When Treat brings home a prosperous businessman Harold (Fred Barton) drunk from a bar one night in order to roll him, Harold ends up moving in. The power forces in the house then shift constantly, and no one’s life is ever the same. 

“Orphans” contains the same kind of vague and mysterious story environment of Pinter’s gangster one-act “Dumbwaiter.” Undefined existential forces threaten the surroundings. Often it’s not exactly clear what these rogues are doing, or preparing to do. Illegal capers loom in the offing, but without specifics. 

So “Orphans” becomes a story of power plays among stronger and weaker individuals, with surprising shifts in the relationship dynamics. The whole story is told pointedly against background themes of parentless-ness and parenting, rootlessness and roots. 

Largely it works, though for me the vague and somewhat imitative plot of “Orphans” does get a bit thin in its final quarter. It feels like playwright Kessler was running out of story gas before his story actually ended. 

The acting in director Virginia Abascal’s production is pretty good grassroots theater. Barson does a nice job as the well-dressed older businessman, visiting from Chicago, drunk in a bar, and oddly stumbling into the brothers’ house with a briefcase full of negotiable securities paper.  

Barson’s low-key cajoling smoothness, even when his character is threatened, creates much of the sense of mystery in this story. 

Kaplan is the stay-at-home slower brother Phillip – affable, friendly and upbeat, but trapped by a controlling sibling in such ignorance about life that he fears walking across town. 

Rubio is the violent, bullying Treat, the play’s emotional flashpoint, and for me the weakness in this production. Although Rubio seems credible at first sight as a tough guy on the surface, as the production evolves, he doesn’t feel emotionally scarred underneath. 

So his performance doesn’t contain that history of inner torture that Treat should have. Interactions early on with his brother Phillip have a superficial chirpiness that doesn’t fit the character. 

Designer Keith Snider deserves mention for his stylized, hallucinatory, sliding-sideways house set, which frames the story in an appropriately distorted world. 

For many years playwright Kessler has worked with hospital patients facilitating “imagination workshops” with his wife actor Margaret Ladd (of “Falcon Crest” fame). From these workshops emerged some of his ideas about neglected children that underlie the story of “Orphans.” 

According to director Abascal, the play’s agents have embargoed “Orphans” from production in California for eight years, pending a deal for Al Pacino to perform it in Southern California. So Speakeasy’s staging, approved personally by playwright Kessler, provides a rare chance to see this worthy piece of stage writing. 

Planet theater reviewer John Angell Grant has written for “American Theater,” “Backstage West,” “Callboard” and many other publications. E-mail him at jagplays@yahoo.com.