Lead character in "The Real Thing" carries show

On the Aisle, by Amy Menerey "It's only a couple of marriages and a child," grumbled Annie to her lover Henry, and with a few passionate kisses and a toss of her hair, he is convinced. But karma comes back around for the intellectual playwright in Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing," the last play of Valley Performing Arts' season.

Henry, played insightfully by Jeff Babcock, is a writer, with a capital "w," and holds the written word to extremely high standards -- not so his morals, which comes back to haunt him when Annie (Tami Shelton) later commits adultery.

The story is a good one, of a man so involved with his work and the wonderment of life's intricacies that he fails to attend to his own life.

Eventually, he accepts his faults and recognizes a true emotion that defies articulation.

Unfortunately, Saturday night's performance fell flat in telling the story -- especially in light of VPA's many previous achievements.

Although most of the play is centered on Henry and Annie, the supporting roles of Max (Steve Byrd), Charlotte (Bonnie Honkola), Billy (Mike Sant), Debbie (Aurora Pease), and Brodie (Lundon Boyd) lacked substance. When Charlotte discovers the affair between Henry and Annie she is not believable as a rejected wife.

Even though she later admits she knew that Henry never truly loved her and didn't bother to "care" about their marriage she has none of the indignance an audience would expect from someone whose husband so shamelessly left her and their child in the dust.

Perhaps Stoppard's writing can be attributed to holding the actors back in expressing emotions that would make the situations more believable, but nonetheless it leaves Babcock and Shelton to carry the momentum and make the play believable.

A sparse set -- also written into the play -- is designed to lend more attention to the actors, but, in this case, leaves a hollow feeling that seemed to echo among the empty seats of the Machetanz theater.

Babcock's representation of Henry, with his philosophical, thought-provoking rhetoric and odd fascination with pop music, was the play's saving grace.