Review: Becky's New Car by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Zach's post card calls it "A Revved-up Comic Adventure!"
The website is even more breathless, promising
"[a] life-affirming comedy about an eccentric millionaire who offers Becky the keys to a brand new life [in][. . . . ] a fantastically funny exploration about class, wealth and selling out during Becky's wild ride through a clever twist of events. Huge laughs, hairpin plot turns and a story with the pedal to the metal. Buckle up!"
So when we got a last-minute, unexpected chance to attend a dress rehearsal of Becky's New Car at the Zach, we couldn't resist. We even dressed up a bit, only to find ourselves well splashed by the Wednesday night downpour by the time we got to the theatre.
The house was relatively sparse, as you can see in these photos taken that same evening by Kirk R. Tuck. Playwright and Director Steven Dietz welcomed us but cautioned us that in this dress rehearsal they might at any time stop for adjustments or even decide to re-run scenes. That did not happen, but we were aware of Dietz and assistant director Courtney Sale sitting in rear rows and intently making notes.
Just as well. The web-blurb rode the car metaphor too far and promised more than the work-in-progress delivered that evening.
Lauren Lane is warm and endearing in her role as 40-something working mom Becky Foster. Playwright Dietz sets her up to win our hearts by granting her permission to talk directly with audience members. She's gracious and friendly, with a vague, lost air as she moves around the Whisenhut's intimate theatre in the round. When we first see her, she is picking up after her 26-year-old unemployed stay-at-home student son and her husband Joe the roofer. Most of the stage serves as her suburban home, with the desk in the southeast representing her job -- bookkeeper to a car dealership. Dietz gives her apparent command of the lights and staging, so that she can shuttle from one locale to the other at will.
Lane's gentle dedication and wistful confiding in that long opening solo put us firmly on her side, an orientation that becomes even stronger as we meet Josh Meyer as her goal-less son and Chris Gibson as her cheery, shallow husband. No one is taking care of Becky. At work it's even worse. Her co-worker Steve the car salesman is a needy, hysterical widower who obsesses repeatedly over the hiking accident that precipitated his wife Rita into a chasm. Ben Prager as Steve is a walking, gesticulating, emoting mess of needs, permanently dependent upon the tolerance of Becky, evidently his only friend.
Into that barren emotional scape, late at night while she's struggling alone to close the books, sweeps Lucien Douglas as Walter Flood the billboard king. Courteous, emotive, well-tailored and talkative, he's a recent widower with more money than he can bother to count. He's looking for gifts for his employees and has stopped on a last-minute whim "to buy some cars."
The chemistry between Douglas and Lane is charming and uplifting. Yes, the whole plot hinges at this point on our buying this dreamboat's misperception that Becky, like himself, has lost a spouse. And we do, because Douglas plays him with wide-eyed enthusiasm, a sort of grown-up, unthinkingly privileged man with attention deficit disorder. There follows an impossible courtship that Becky cannot bear to break off, and some further plot twists that propel her into Flood's household and guest quarters for a 3-week stay, hidden from husband and son as a fictitious assignment to the still-in-construction new mega-cardealership.
To that point -- essentially to the intermission -- the playwright/director set us up for a screwball comedy frolic. The second act was a fast ride downhill. Having infused our star with hope and a view of the promised land, Dietz appeared systematically to deny it all to her. After the break, Becky was essentially volitionless. Her canny blue-collar husband Joe acquired a Pinteresquie sheen as he figured the situation out, brought a chastened Flood into his home for some mind games, and manipulated some far-fetched plot twists to pretend that Becky was dead and gone. Complete with a memorial service, long faces, and stunned, shamed grieving by Flood and by Becky's friends and their son.
As for that new car, you can pretty much disregard it as another mechanical plot device. There's this other faceless woman who has ordered a top-of-the-line sedan, Becky's employer gets an identical ride for her as an incentive to go eventually to the mega-dealership, and the faceless woman is the one who winds up dead in the ocean but with Becky's purse and ID on the seat beside her. The new car is the only thing that Becky retains after the confrontation and humiliation -- useful so that her smug husband can take her for long drives to remind her that he is still in control.
There are good jokes and plot mischief along the way. Turns out that Joe the roofer knows the Floods because he gave them an estimate for roof repair; Flood's daughter Kenni has been the unpresented girlfriend to Becky's useless son; and Babs George does a confident turn as a down-on-her-luck heiress obliged to go out and get a job as a bartender.
Jason Amato's lighting works nicely and Michael Raiford's clever billboard decorations are a relaxed blend of Jackson Pollock and Lamar Outdoor Advertising. Dietz kept his characters circulating, except for one long sequence in the second act when Lane and Douglas were parked on a platform at the north-central location of the theatre, imagined to be a terrace at the Flood mansion. Inexplicably, that scene was played as if the actors were on a proscenium stage facing south -- so those of us seated in sections northeast and northwest were left for long minutes to study the backs of heads and the backsides of costumes.
As always, the Zach is using notable local talent, and Becky's New Car can serve as a demonstration of how gifted actors deal with plot and characters that twist in unexpectedly knotty fashion. But for the two of us, preview night was not an adventure for Becky -- at least, not beyond the intermission -- and we walked away with the uneasy feeling that our heroine Becky Foster was stuck a long way from happiness with no towing service to call.
Others on the "A-Team" of reviewers at the Creative Alliance's NowPlayingAustin (see link, below) wrote about the same performance -- calling it "poignant" and "relaxed, enjoyable," citing "terrific acting," and commenting, "You will not be disappointed."
Tastes differ, perceptions differ, a theatrical piece evolves, and you never see exactly the same show from night to night. As Dietz writes in the program, "The road to your mind and your funny bone [is] much more treacherous and unpredictable than the road to your sympathetic emotions."
That's why theatre is the ultimate in unique, customized personal entertainment -- just for you, in that time and that moment.
Comments and reviews at NowPlayingAustin.com
Spike Gillespie's enthusiastic review at her blog "Spike Speaks," June 9
Review by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin in the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, June 21
Review by Elizabeth Cobbe in the Austin Chronicle, June 24
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, June 25
EXTRAS
Interview of Lauren Lane by Marilyn McCray, published in June edition of Austin Woman
Click to view excerpts from Zach Theatre's program for Becky's New Car
Becky's New Car
by Steven Dietz
Zach Theatre
