The festival's bright upside is a play about a flighty dreamer.

Byline: PLAY REVIEW By Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

`Up' - a brilliant play by Los Angeles playwright Bridget Carpenter - is original, poignant, moving, sad and funny. I have rarely sat in a theater audience that laughed so hard at one moment and, at the next, sat so still you'd swear you could hear the actors' hearts beating together on stage.

`Up,' which opened last weekend at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is built around the real-life story of Larry Walters. In 1982, Walters launched himself from a backyard in San Pedro, Calif., on a lawn chair suspended from 42 weather balloons. Walters, a truck driver, had dreamed his whole life of making this flight. It took him 16,000 feet above the city, earned him a spot on David Letterman and got him a citation from the Federal Aviation Administration.

In `Up,' Walters has become Walter Griffin, family man and schlemiel, who 16 years after the famous lawn chair flight - he keeps the news clippings tucked in a box and the lawn chair hidden in the basement - still hasn't forged his life's dreams into any solid reality.

As the play opens in the family kitchen, Walter's now just an unemployed inventor with a sullen teenage son, Mikey, and an increasingly desperate wife, Helen, who would love to keep supporting his dreams but grows more tired year by year of holding down the only paying job in the household.

Helen keeps herself together by fantasizing about her `real husband,' who always buys flowers and brews her cappuccino in the morning. She delivers letters for the Postal Service to pay the bills and insure some kind of savings for the family to rely on.

Meanwhile, Walter tinkers at the kitchen table on a succession of pathetic new lawn chair projects.

Into their lives steps Maria, a 16-year-old schoolgirl with a fey, worldly attitude and a six-month pregnancy. As she and Mikey fall sweetly in love, the characters in this odd foursome play out a complex set of variations on the irreconcilable tension between dreams and money, soaring love and humdrum reality.

Above them all - literally, above them on stage - walks a character named Philippe Petit. In real life, Philippe Petit once walked a high wire illegally strung between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

Petit, the character in the play, dances overhead as the embodiment of Walter's hopes and dreams. When he walked between the Twin Towers, Petit tells Walter, it was as if time itself stood still. Taxi drivers got out of their cabs and stared up into the sky. `Everyone on Wall Street stopped trying to make money,' he says.

Plays based on real life can feel cramped and literal. Carpenter has used reality as a springboard and then gone way beyond, making her play a reflection on the difficult place of inspiration in the everyday world.

At one point, the action on stage becomes a four-part fugue, as Petit, Maria, Mikey and Walter are all engrossed in their own separate actions, from singing to high-wire walking. They all have impossible dreams. Mikey and Maria's love is as odd and breathtaking and, ultimately, as hazardous as that lawn chair flight.

Inevitably, Walter begins to crack under the strain, first in small ways - he inexplicably tears up a dollar bill on stage - and then in ways much larger and more ominous.

`Up' premiered in 2003 at the Perseverance Theatre in Douglas, Alaska.

For the Ashland production, Carpenter has worked extensively with director Michael Barakiva, rewriting three scenes completely and fitting the show to Ashland's better equipped stage.

The casting is terrific. Christine Albright, a newcomer to the festival, is electric as the pregnant and worldly Maria, oozing attitudinous charm and teenage wisdom. Richard Howard, a veteran of 18 seasons at Ashland, plays a perfectly shambling Walter, and Terri McMahon, who was Assunta in last year's ``Napoli Milionaria,'' is nicely ambivalent as Helen, the wife who struggles to hold the family together around Walters' dream - which was once, after all, her dream, too.

Barakiva directs with cool precision; in a play that soars so high off the ground, he manages to see to it that the lawn chair, this time anyway, comes most of the way safely back to Earth. The play's ending, while beautiful, comes across slightly muddled.

`Up' is a play that will stick with you. It manages to take on big themes without once being ostentatious or preachy.

We are all Walters in this nation of celebrity wannabees and American idols. We are all taught from the cradle to just do it, to chase our dreams, to soar like eagles and create our own realities. `Up' dearly loves dreams and dreamers, but acknowledges that chasing dreams can be both bold and foolish. You may not want to tie yourself to a lawn chair and 42 weather balloons, but do go see `Up' this spring before it closes on June 23.

- Bob Keefer

PLAYS CURRENTLY RUNNING IN ASHLAND

Up: What happens to your life when you attach 42 balloons to a lawn chair and sail off into the urban sky? Michael Barakiva directs this play by Bridget Carpenter, which is based on a weird but true story. At the New Theatre through June 23.

The Winter's Tale: Outgoing OSF artistic director Libby Appel directs Shakespeare's tragedy of a jealous monarch who loses all. Through Oct. 29 at the Angus Bowmer Theatre. See review, Page F2

The Diary of Anne Frank: Wendy Kesselman's 1997 adaptation of the blander 1950s Broadway version of this famous tale of a girl who died in the Holocaust. James Edmondson directs. Through July 9 at the Angus Bowmer Theatre.

The Importance of Being Earnest: Peter Amster directs the Oscar Wilde classic, showing the legendary wit at his witty best. At the Angus Bowmer Theatre through Oct. 29.