Provenance

What value do books have as objects? Are books about experiences or about content?

These are the questions raised in Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder's play Provenance, in a world premiere production in the B3 Series at the B Street Theatre this month. They are worthy questions, addressed in the story of an isolated librarian in a mountaintop library of rare books, visited by an antiquarian in search of a particular copy of a particular book, the antiquarian's angry daughter, and a local man with a romantic yen for her.

Cleo (Kristine David), the librarian, would just like them all to leave. But people have a habit of pursuing their own agendas.

As Frances, the antiquarian, Julia Brothers is delightfully droll, while her estranged daughter Amelia (Brittni Barger) is appropriately frustrated and hurt. As George, the retired would-be Romeo, Dan Harlan is a steadfast presence.

But the show really belongs to the quirky Cleo, and David captures her nerdy goodness beautifully. More at home among the books, the disruptions wrought to her life by her insistent visitors really are the least of her troubles.

There's not enough good things to be said about the amazing set, which is a multilevel library of the sort bibliophiles dream of inhabiting, and director David Pierini has a deft touch that encourages the actors to use their bodies as much as the play's dialogue. In fact, the only flaws in this production are in the age difference between Cleo and George—which is addressed only in a throwaway line (“You think I'm too old”) and comes across as uncomfortably familial rather than companionate—and in a too-pat resolution that does not address the question voracious readers most want answered: What will happen to the books?

That's because a book without a reader is, quite simply, a doorstop.