Chemistry lesson

Marlane Meyer's new comedy of change

by Carolyn Clay

THE CHEMISTRY OF CHANGE. By Marlane Meyer. Directed by Constance Grappo. Set design by Narelle Sissons. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Jeff Nellis. Sound by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. With Cynthia Strickland, Janice Duclos, Judith Roberts, Eric Tucker, Mauro Hantman, Jamison Selby, and Paul O'Brien. Part of the Providence New Play Festival, at Trinity Repertory Company through April 26.

The catalyst in The Chemistry of Change is a carnival worker named Smokey. To muddy the experiment (and give it spiritual overtones), he first appears in the guise of a clawed and behorned devil -- a Mephistopheles of the midway, out to "destabilize" a 1950s American family that's as far from the picket-fenced neighborhood of Donna Reed as Faust is from Touched by an Angel. Farther, actually, since to judge by Marlane Meyer's amusing if strange new comedy, now in its world premiere at Trinity Rep, the lands of Goethe and sit-com are close enough to share a beat-up back yard.

Meyer is a West Coast playwright whose works include Etta Jenks, Kingfish, and Geography of Luck, all nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (awarded annually to a play written by a woman for the English-speaking theater), as well as Moe's Lucky Seven, which finally won the damn thing. She also writes for TV, most recently for the series Nothing Sacred. Certainly little is sacred in the wackily transformative Chemistry of Change, which melds white-trash comedy with peals of redemption, as a dysfunctional trailer-parkish clan -- four adult children and one aunt, dominated by sexy matriarch Lee -- spreads its stunted wings.

There are shades here of Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, as well as of Tennessee Williams. In other words, Meyer may be the inventor of a new genre: Southern California Gothic. Certainly she is a follower in the footsteps of Chris Durang and Scott McPherson (Marvin's Room), lacing family pathos and perverse comedy with a soupon of surrealism. As The Chemistry of Change opens, in a dirt yard fronting set designer Narelle Simpson's cleverly truncated evocation of homy squalor, spinsters Dixon and Corlis react with alarm as Lee emerges from the house dressed to the nines in black and white. An abortionist by trade, the middle-aged but still alluring Lee periodically panics about the Big House and resolves to shore up the family finances by marrying for money; it is immediately clear to sister Dixon and daughter Corlis that such a moment has again come.

A funny thing happens, however, on Lee's way to meet scrap-metal king and designated connubial victim Reggie. Waiting by the local lowlife amusement park, she is seduced by Smokey, who emerges from the red-eyed-devil door of his haunted-house attraction, horns and insouciance bristling. It seems he knows everything about her hard-luck life, her womanly disappointments, her dependent brood.

They're an odd assortment: "good-looking drunk" Baron, just home from detox; the agoraphobic, man-hating Corlis, thwarted in love by her domineering mom; and baby brothers Farley, a diffident cardsharp, and bouncing-18-year-old Shep, who has recently impregnated his biology teacher and naively dreams of playing Robert Young to her Jane Wyatt. Fright-meister Smokey means to make a trusting woman of Lee and get the kids to leave the nest to which she has them Oedipally chained. Ah, but intimacy and change are scarier than Hell and Spooky World put together.

The Chemistry of Change has a lot going for it, not least that it's offbeat and very funny, with its pithy eccentrics and sly Satanic imagery. (The play ends with a costume barbecue to which everyone comes dressed as the devil, but only Smokey can light the grill.) I won't even quibble that, for social dregs and misfits, Meyer's characters are awfully quick on the uptake. And given the fable aspect of the play, I'll let it go that their fulfillment/employment problems are so easily solved.

But The Chemistry of Change does not quite balance its seriocomic equation, and it hides some pretty schmaltzy definitions of "being a man" and "being a woman" behind its 1950s setting. Moreover, in some instances the play, which is billed as a work in progress, gussies up as ironic ambiguities what I suspect are as-yet-unsolved problems. The character of Lee, though played with slink and steel (and a voice of honey-dipped gravel) by Judith Roberts, can't seem to decide whether she wants to ditch her brood or have her kids and eat them, too. And though I don't care whether Smokey is Beelzebub or "the out-picturing of [Lee's] secret desire for a marriage of equals," the character, as written, metamorphoses from sinister apparition to vaguely ominous interloper to working-class Alan Alda. The accomplished Paul O'Brien plays each with cowboy polish, but they need to add up.

A word in praise of the Providence New Play Festival, two-year-old brainchild of Trinity artistic director Oskar Eustis. It is exhilarating to see -- and to have the playwright be able to see -- new work being given full production by a first-rate troupe, ˆ la Louisville's Humana Festival. Visiting director Constance Grappo's staging of Chemistry of Change is stylish if a tad tilted toward the play's cartoon side. And the performances, especially by Janice Duclos as Corlis, are wonderful amalgams of lunacy and vulnerability. Meyer has performed the neat trick of spinning dysfunction into gold. Likely, the sharp Trinity staging will show her how to polish it.