“Becky’s New Car” takes a while to go from 0 to 60, but it’s an enjoyable trip all the same. Steven Dietz’ play made its St. Louis debut last night as the opener of the Insight Theatre Company’s season at the Heagney Theater on the Nerinx Hall High School campus and it was fun for all.
Dietz, who is one of the busiest playwrights around, stays away from Broadway but seems to have lots of business in smaller cities and regional theaters. The play, which had its premiere in Seattle in 2008, is a comedy with a surprisingly modern view of morality, guilt and penance. He breaks the fourth wall and brings the audience into the action three or four times, which is two or three times too often. Maybe it’s an attempt to get an audience more involved, but makes me think I’m watching a bad TV quiz show.
Becky Foster, played with great charm and sharp timing by Susie Wall, is the long-time wife of a roofer, mother of a college graduate doing post-graduate study of Mom’s cooking and laundry. She’s been primarily a wife and a mother, living a lower-middle class life, working as an administrative assistant and jack-of-all-menial-duties for an automobile dealer somewhere in the Seattle area (and why have American playwrights never written a comedy set in the easy-to-rig location of an automobile showroom?), overworked and underpaid.
She’s in the office one evening, working late, when Walter Flood (a strong performance by John Contini) walks in, identifies himself as one of the town’s richest men, and writes a check for nine new, top-of-the-line cars to give to his employees as holiday bonuses. He talks about his late wife, who died recently, and understands Becky as also being a recent widow. She offers the truth; he does not listen. He asks her to a party on his island estate, and in a burst of what-the-hell-here’s-my-chance enthusiasm, she accepts.
And she buys a new black dress, too.
She goes into an affair with Flood, lies to her husband, Joe (a delightfully brusque, up-front portrayal by Jerry Russo). He’s thick as a brick, trusts her implicitly, buys her stories. Dietz wades into the morass of morality with the affair, and before the final curtain, he goes into deeper water to deal with all the emotions that bubble to the top when deceit is uncovered.
Along the way, Dietz creates some interesting characters, especially Ginger (Tommy Nolan), a woman of a certain age who sets her cap for Walter. Nolan is right-on in her portrayal, balancing elegantly between underplaying too far and becoming a caricature. Credit to the actress, and also to director Tlaloc Rivers, who keeps the entire cast working on a fine level.
Dietz shows some real dialogue skill, too. Scott McMaster, as Becky’s son, levels a former girl friend when he describes her as being composed of “lipstick, Spandex and exclamation points,” and later, when Walter tries to explain away the affair with a cheap excuse, Joe retorts, “Look, no one cares how tired you are, how hard you work or what happened at the airport!”
Sean Savoie designed set and lights, with an interesting look to the stage and a backdrop that immediately made me think of Sam Shepard. Both were effective, though a follow-spot operator showed some burlesque humor when the spot preceded Wall by a step or two as she crossed the stage.
Good humor, good acting, sharp writing as Insight certainly lives up to its name in the United States of the 21st-century.
Becky’s New Car, a production of Insight Theatre Company, will be on stage at the Heagney Theatre of Nerinx Hall High School through June 19
—Joe