JAMES DICKEY’S DELIVERANCE, Godlight Theatre Company at 59E59

Imagine John Boorman’s film Deliverance staged, “panties” scene and all, as a piece of dinner theater, with all the performers looking very serious and projecting their voices, the way they believe real men should, as they mime handling things like paddles and bows, and describe scenes whose drama is supposed to be visual, like climbing up a cliff face or sneaking up on an enemy. Now subtract the dinner, put yourself before a fog-filled bare black-box stage with a reflective black floor, and you have imagined the unfortunate experiment that is Godlight Theatre Company’s presentation of James Dickey’s Deliverance, adapted by Sean Tyler, with Joe Tantalo directing. Though the show, with its title, appears to go out of its way to disassociate itself from the 1972 film, in the end it is, for all intents and purposes, the playing out of that movie, minus all those things that were so essential to the motion picture’s artistic success—recall the magical guitar-banjo duel, so virtuosic in the film, so pedestrian in Mr. Tantalo’s version.