Becky's New Car

The work of playwright Steven Dietz has been all over the Boston theater scene recently, from the Brown Box Theatre Project's presentation of "The Nina Variations" last June to Flat Earth Theatre's production of "Rocket Man" in August, to the premiere of "Rancho Mirage" at the New Rep in October.

The Lyric Stage Company of Boston jumps aboard with "Becky's New Car," a work from 2008 in which Dietz examines the discontents of a wife and working woman, both in the workplace and at home. Becky Foster (Celeste Oliva) puts in a lot of extra hours at the car dealership where she works; her husband, Joe (Mike Dorval), has similarly been away for long days doing a roofing job in another town. There's no real strife between Becky and Joe; the one point of real domestic anxiety lies with their 26-year-old son, Chris (Alex Marz), a grad student in psychology, whose laziness around the house is matched only by his late-night drinking and his employment of shrink jargon, learned from textbooks and used defensively. "My son is loaded, and the dishwasher isn't," complains Becky -- this task being the one thing she's asked of Chris lately.

The workload at the dealership, similarly, isn't so much a crisis as a matter of grinding everyday tedium and special circumstance: The business is set to launch a major new branch, and Becky is angling for a promotion. Among her work colleagues is anxiety-ridden Steve (Jaime Carillo), a recent widower consumed with grief and existential despair -- his wife fell off a mountain and died while hiking.

Which leads to another of Dietz's thematic fibers here. The play is littered with dead and presumed-dead spouses, raising questions about the vitality of relationships after the tragic loss of one participant, as well as the specter of relationships that have become moribund with both partners still very much alive. Another widower is Walter Flood (Will McGarrhan), an extremely wealthy businessman who wanders into the dealership late one night with an impulse to buy everyone on his staff a new car as a bonus. While other men might be smitten with the beauty of the machines on the lot, it's Becky who catches Walter's eye, and, for some reason, Walter takes it into his head that Becky, too, has lost her mate. Soon, he's phoning her up, and not just to talk about titles and standard features.

Becky, intrigued, doesn't try too hard to dissuade his attentions, and ends up attending a fancy party at Walter's home, where she meets Walter's daughter Kenni (Samantha Richert) and Ginger (Kortney Adams), an old friend with romantic designs on Walter that are not at all reciprocated.

So begins Becky's flirtation with major transformations in life and work; as she puts it, when a woman says she wants a new house, she's really saying she wants a new spouse, and when she says she wants a new car, what she's feeling is a need for a whole new life. (Symbolically -- and this is also important to the plot -- Becky's boss, pleased with her diligence and the major sale she's made to Walter, tosses her a reward in the form of a beautiful, fully kitted out new vehicle.)

But the flights of fancy that a moment's excitement can prompt have a way of being drawn down by the gravity of real life, and Joe -- an alpha male, but not a dummy -- soon begins to put things together. Just how badly will Becky crash land, and what will it mean for her increasingly complicated life?

Dietz has a way of creating believable setups and then spicing them up (or watering them down) with fantastical elaborations on what are otherwise straightforward stories. In this case, there are mix-ups of identity and improbable alignments of events. Fair enough; Shakespeare traded in just such stuff. The only problem is, Dietz isn't Shakespeare, and these motifs don't go down as well here. Director Larry Coen muddles things with a couple of seriously tone-deaf moments, as when Steve at work describes, and flashes back on, his wife's fatal fall. The tasteless way this moment is staged is not in the script, and the moment clashes with the scene in which it's set.

Such rough patches mostly occur during Act One, when Dietz is still sketching out his characters and the world in which they live. In Act Two, the various threads start to weave together and tighten into an ultimately satisfying tapestry (though the story's beats can be heard, like horse hooves, miles before they come into sight; many of the play's twists are easy to guess well in advance).

Act One's only-intermittent capacity to draw one in is due in part to the staging and the set, which is designed to look like a board game (or, rather, the end result of a carambolage involving half a dozen board games, as though Hasbro and Mattel had collided on a foggy highway). This feels like a serious miscalculation. Yes, Dietz's play looks at life as a series of strategic moves, taking the oft-fictitious adage of "playing by the rules" to achieve one's goals and reap one's rewards as a serious point from which to proceed -- but we don't need that theme to be translated literally into the scenic design, nor does the production's novel means of introducing characters by having them whizz in on a plastic slide, like steel spheres in a game of pinball, add anything. Quite the contrary: It's hard to take the play seriously when there's a feeling established right at the first that you should do anything but. Even comedy, after all, requires emotional investment.

To their credit, the cast create that investment. Oliva's Becky is a complex woman of middle years, a person whose life has been devoted to all the right things: Family, productivity, a more prosperous future. It's only natural that a grown son who refuses to grow up, and a life less rewarding than what she's worked for, would leave her feeling short-changed and in a mood to play around a little, especially with someone who not only clearly adores her but has the monetary clout to dispel all financial worries. Oliva brings Becky to life with color and snap, but also a depth of conflicting feelings that buoys the production up and over the writing's sometimes forced symmetries and symbolism.

Dorval's Joe, meantime, is part cave man, part unshakably supportive spouse; he expresses a wish (genuine, and genuinely primitive) to kill his rival, but also plays this particular game with unusual intelligence and cool. And speaking of McGarrahan, he's one of the most reliable performers on the Boston stage, bringing a lightness, a deftness, and a sparkle to any role he undertakes; all those qualities are present in his performance here.

Adams, Marz, Carillo, and Richert are given less to do, and the characters of Kenni and Chris are saddled with an especially risible sub-plot built on the most Dickensian of coincidences; Steve, meantime, is underwritten and ends up being little more than a foil and a boob, without much payoff even for his one really good scene; Carillo overcompensates a bit, by chewing the candy-colored scenery. But on the whole, the cast bring real energy, even delight, to the stage -- as does Margo Cadell's lighting design and Edward Young's sound design.

"Becky's New Car" isn't the sleek, purring ride you might want, but it takes you someplace worthy of the trip.