The Silver Spring Penguin

The Silver Spring Stage (10145 Colesville Rd) takes a lackluster plot, polishes it with superb acting, and gets “The Drawer Boy.”

In the story, theater student and ingenue Miles (Matthew Boliek, above left) meets two quirky men working the same farm. Workhorse Morgan (Ted Schneider, above right) is a perpetual ball buster who effortlessly weaves in and out of hyperbole. Pitiful Angus (Steve LaRocque, above center) can’t remember one minute from the next.

One night, Miles overhears the two farmers recounting their personal history. (Spoiler alert: They’re not gay.) When Miles uses the farmers’ story in a play, relationships unravel in a predictable heap and are reorganized with the predictable truth. Key word: predictable.

Canadian playwright Michael Healey gives away too many details in the first act. The farmers’ shared “secret,” the engine that drives this 90-minute play, loses steam midway in the first act. By the second act, the secret is so transparent, it’s invisible.

Instead, “The Drawer Boy” chugs along on the strengths of its performers. Ted Schneider gives the blue-collar Morgan an acerbic wit balanced beautifully with kind-hearted (albeit guilt-driven) gentleness. Steve LaRocque sets the play’s pace, gradually revealing the confusion, anger and grief behind farmer Angus’s frailty.

Matthew Boliek, as the theater student, gives his character an expected gullability. (His interpretation of an anxious dairy cow provides comic relief.) However, Boliek also injects a sinister streak that selfishly probes into the farmers’ secret, only to have it explode in his face.

The actors’ performances make “The Drawer Boy” worth the short trip to Four Corners.

“The Drawer Boy”

Starring Steve LaRocque (Angus), Ted Schneider (Morgan) and Matthew Boliek (Miles). Written by Michael Healey. Directed by Bridget Muehlberger.

Weekend performances run through May 8, 2007. Tickets are $13 to $18.

Photo by Neil Edgell/Silver Spring Stage.