Upon entering the Avery Schreiber Theatre in North Hollywood, you are confronted with a wonderful set and evocative sound – on the tiny stage are a full corn field and the front room and porch of an old farm house, closed in and foreboding, lit to feel like very late afternoon. There are lazy crickets chirping in the distance and the soft, eerie sound of evening wind creaking through crops. On the wall is a screen upon which is projected a well produced slide show of a young Midwestern girl in a lonely rural setting. I sat down with my theatre companion prepared for a wonderful night of theatre.

Then the show started. With the entrance of the young woman, then a long, pregnant pause. So pregnant it could have delivered twins. Then the young woman, Cally (Linda Tamassone) spoke, then another pregnant pause before she went in to the house for some more silence between her and her mother and I thought, oh, no. Someone thinks they’re creating an “important work.” Perhaps in the realm of Faulkner or Williams. They are misguided in that thought. Even Faulkner or Williams, done well, do not take themselves as seriously as this, and this play comes nowhere near attaining that aspiration. The play is a strange mixup of The Rainmaker, every Williams play ever written, Picnic, Carrie and any number of Twilight Zone episodes without the chills and works itself up to a fever pitch by the end, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

It’s sad, too, because the technical aspects of the play were so good, perhaps the best technical production of any play done on a small stage that I have ever seen. The set, by Vincent Albo, was wonderful, evocative and moody. How did he grow all that corn there? The sound design, by Craig Polding, was exceptional. The lighting, by Phil Kong, was innovative, evocative, original and very effective, especially the glow from under the floorboards of the rickety farm house during the “suspenseful” moments. The multimedia (stills and video projected on to the screen as interstitial mood-setters) by Stephen Stalker and director Antony Barrios, was very powerful.

The staging of this play itself was odd, though. The surprise of the young woman, and later the young man, appearing out of the cornfield would have been very effective had we not heard them noisily entering it during the opening blackout. Probably unfair, it would have been cruel to have them preset there the entire time the audience milled about as it filled the theatre. But wait, didn’t Gilda Radner do just that in order to jump up out of a pile of rags in the middle of the stage as Candy Slice in her one-woman show on Broadway?

And everyone sort of did exactly what they were talking about (and they talked about doing a lot of things) such as “I was reading a National Geographic” as the Mother picks up a National Geographic, “and found an article about Antarctica” as she flips to an article about Antarctica. It actually got to the point of “I walked up the stairs” as someone walked up the stairs.

Unfortunately, they started out with a disadvantage. You already know that, whenever there is a cornfield nearby, something will come out of it and something will go into it and, with the possible exception of the field in Field of Dreams, it will not turn out well.

Actresses love to cry and Ms. Tomassone was very good at that and had ample opportunity to show her facility. However, her tears felt more like someone showing off technique than being organically pulled from her eyes by the circumstances swirling around her and I not only wasn’t moved by them, I eventually became annoyed by them.

Deborah Leman, who played Rose, Cally’s mother, is a fine actress, but the role of the repressed, possibly schizophrenic mother who tries to control every moment of her daughter’s existence wasn’t well developed here.

Ian Jerrell who plays Nick, the tall, dark, handsome stranger is also a good actor. He’s tall, he’s dark and he is certainly handsome, but in a completely, unfortunately innocent, way. I didn’t believe for a minute that he had worked in the mines (or even seen a mine) and almost laughed when he said he had. There most probably isn’t a single callous on his entire body. He didn’t have even a small bit of the innate danger nor the sexual power inferred by the lines and needed to disrupt so many lives. In fact, my theatre companion commented that she’d not only not be afraid of him, she’d eat him alive. There was little or no spark nor heat between him and Cally.

In the press release, the play is called a fever dream, and I can see that, in retrospect. I didn’t see it on the stage, however. In fact, the deep psychological twists and surprises were so telegraphed that I could almost tell exactly when each one would be “revealed”.

It’s hard to analyze the play itself, despite the “I went in to her room” as someone goes into her room “and picked up the wooden box of money” as someone picks up… a wooden box filled with money kind of writing because of the odd staging. Granted, the stage is small, but there had to be a better solution to needing a bedroom than having the mother asleep in her rocking chair as her daughter describes entering the forbidden bedroom and discovering the small wooden box that’s been on the stage, under the rocker, since the lights first came up. It may have been psychologically disturbing in another setting, in the seventies, with different actors, when it was first written. I’ll never know.

The costumes were also good, but I do not see them credited to anyone in the program.

Scarecrow was written by Don Nigro and directed by Antony Berrios.

Scarecrow is performed Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. through October 17, 2009

The Avery Schreiber Theatre is located at 11050 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, 91601, just east of Lankershim and west of Vineland.

Ticket prices: General Admission, $20.00, Senior and Students: $15.00

Reservations by phone at (818) 859-3160.