BWW Reviews: SCR Stages World Premiere of SMOKEFALL

"Wow, that whole thing just went over my head... but at least the old guy was funny!"

It's something I overheard from a fellow audience member as I was leaving South Coast Repertory's recent World Premiere production of Noah Haidle's SMOKEFALL, now playing its final set of shows in Costa Mesa through April 28. As dismissive and tartly succinct as that statement was, it actually sounded like a fair assessment of the same show I had just seen.

This year's main-stage attraction of SCR's annual Pacific Playwrights Festival, SMOKEFALL---a co-production with Chicago's Goodman Theatre directed by Anne Kauffman---starts off initially intriguing, as if first unveiling itself as a dark dramedy that follows three generations of an eccentric family living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the tolls that the passage of time imposes on their lives. But instead, what actually transpires through the course of its three acts is an uneven play that ultimately gets too bogged down in its own randomly structured quirkiness.

The first act introduces this one-of-a-kind family to the audience: there's stay-at-home mom Violet (Heidi Dippold) pregnant with twins and due, well, any day now. Her live-in father, the Colonel (a terrific Orson Bean) is showing the memory-lapsing effects of age, but is often seen cheerfully accompanied by the family's mute, non-barking pet, Sparky. Violet's husband Daniel (Corey Brill) seems steadfast on the outside; but, inside, he is emotionally spent, wanting out of the imprisonment this life has handed him. And then there's Violet and Daniel's daughter Beauty (Carmela Corbett), a teen who refuses to speak and whose diet consists of odd things like dirt and paint (all happily served by her placating mother).

Much of the play's exposition is delivered via the dapper Mr. Footnote (Leo Marks), the play's time-traveling, all-seeing, all-knowing "narrator" that breaks the fourth wall and interjects himself into the action by espousing numbered "footnotes" directly to the audience to explain each character's inner thoughts, hopes, dreams, and desires (he even speaks for the unborn twins!). Sounding---and sharply dressed---like a 60's film noir gumshoe, Footnote helps fill in the gaps by matter-of-factly stating the play's truths. Since SMOKEFALL is often clouded in its own symbolism and metaphors, I suppose without Footnote, the story the play is attempting to dish out wouldn't have much meat in its bones.

It is certainly a wonderful surprise, then, that the play's best, most enjoyable part is actually it's middle act, where we find ourselves inside Violet's womb to find her soon-to-be-born twin boys conversing about life outside the womb, and the joys and pains its uncertain nature could/will bring once they've been expelled out into the real world. Between Sondheim riffs and its bittersweet final beat, this dual exchange between Fetus One (Brill) and Fetus Two (Marks) proves to be the play's most provocative, most entertaining section---precisely because it feels to be the most truthful and fleshed-out, despite its outlandish setting (Violet's womb!) and the very adult-world themes these two, well, children pontificate. (To be honest, I actually would have preferred to have seen a play that tracks just these two articulate fetuses arguing back and forth)

So by the time the final act arrives, zooming us to the future of Fetus Two who grows up to be an aging, broken loner named Johnny (played by Bean in his second role in the play), SMOKEFALL has spun itself down a spiral of Really Big Ideas that its own machinations just cannot undo from that point. How does it wrap it all up? By sending the audience out to the lobby to partake in pastries and cider for their troubles. They were indeed delicious... perhaps the final note the creative team wanted to leave them with, just in case the main attraction didn't seal the deal.

Sometimes funny, sometimes genuinely heart-tugging, and sometimes frustratingly obscure, SMOKEFALL is as interesting as it is curiously jumbled, often becoming mired in its shaky execution of heavy, heady ideas. Characters' motivations don't feel grounded in anything tangible. And despite peppering the narrative with some cute-sy scenes, sporadic, cute-sy bits of dialogue, and a few walk-ons from a cute-sy puppy (yes, a real, live pooch is part of the cast), audiences may find themselves scratching their heads even as they delight in the delicious apple treats that await them outside.

As a whole, the play is certainly a visual treat on the surface, but its insides are as unfinished as the raw, exposed wood of Marsha Ginsberg's metaphorical set design. And even with its obvious, reverent nod to Thornton Wilder's Our Town embedded in its fidgety DNA, it seems to be striving too hard to be that stage classic's more modern, more high-brow, more avant-garde cousin. Does it succeed as an homage? Perhaps not in its deep foundation, but, rather, on in its tree-punctured exterior.

It's really too bad because all the actors---particularly Bean, Brill and Marks---all turn in such impressive, fully-realized performances, even as they stumble through all of Haidle's seemingly random series of slow burns. Sure, the play may theorize that its very randomness is supposed to mirror the apparent randomness of life---after all, a line in the play even states that "life forces you to improvise." But, truly, when all is seen, said, and done, SMOKEFALL itself feels vastly improvised, even if it didn't necessarily set itself out to be.

Essentially, it's an unvarnished wooden chest of abstract thoughts, feelings, and motifs in dire need of organization and, yes, some color.

Follow this reviewer on Twitter: @cre8iveMLQ

Photos by Henry DiRocco/SCR. From top: Heidi Dippold & Orson Bean; Corey Brill & Leo Marks; and Carmella Corbett

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Performances of SMOKEFALL continue at South Coast Repertory through April 28, 2013. Tickets can be purchased online at www.scr.org, by phone at (714) 708-5555 or by visiting the box office at 655 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa.

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