Keegan Theatre has put a nice polish on the 1990s “Stones in His Pockets,” Marie Jones’s two-person comedy about rural Irish townspeople coping with a big budget Hollywood film crew.
It’s an actors’ showcase, and Josh Sticklin and Matthew J. Keenan playfully embody everyone from town elders to an American starlet. Keenan is particularly flexible, playing regular guy Jake one moment, then shifting posture and voice to become the oldest surviving extra from “The Quiet Man” or a lovelorn production assistant; each glance and inflection is amusingly high-def. Sticklin’s good, too, and hilariously persuasive as the American starlet, especially when she’s limbering up with yoga.
A pub scene seems to bustle even with only the two actors, and the production’s appealing style includes a live video feed projected on a large screen whenever the film crew needs a shot of the extras. This is reliably good for a laugh, but director Abigail Isaac Fine shows her mettle by also gently fleshing out the darker shades of Jones’s showy, gloomy, wry Irish script.
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