by Geoff Hoff~

Mabel Davies has a work-a-day husband who is distant and doesn’t like her son. Her “best friend” neighbor, Fran, is an alcoholic divorcee who, it seems, will sleep with anyone, including Mabel’s son, who is a neo-Nazi who really hates his father.  And Mabel moves forward in life pretending all is well.  She strikes up an unlikely but charming long-distance relationship with Joe, the fellow at the other end of the line when she calls to order a watch for her son’s eighteenth birthday.

Supernova is the second play I’ve seen this year by Tim McNeil, but it doesn’t quite hold together as well as Charm of Making.  Mr. McNeal has once again written a wonderful role for his wife, Bonnie McNeil, who plays Mabel.  Ms. McNeil is a wonderful actor, although her absolute cluelessness at the beginning stretched credibility a bit.  Also, the moment that brings the story to a start, Mabel’s finding of a para-military magazine, dog eared at the page advertising a watch, seems clumsy and confusing.  It’s hard to tell what was wrong with this moment, it may be the fault of the writing (I suspect this is the case), the performance, the direction or just a chance stumble, but it is a crucial moment and because it was confusing it took a while afterwards to be back in the play.

Mr. McNeil is also, it seems, a wonderful actor.  He plays Joe, the watch salesman, and is a sad-sack who is redeemed a bit by the flirtations with this distant voice.  He is also completely distinct from the fey spirit he played in Charm and it wasn’t until I read the program after the play that I realized it was the same man.

The central image of Supernova is a meteor.  Or rather meteors.  The stage is bathed in starlight before the start of the play, and there are many references to meteors blazing through the sky for their brief moment throughout.  The image seems over-large for the story, however.  Mabel’s life is a small one, her world a small world that opens up a bit when her conversations with Joe start to spark an awareness of just how bleak it really is.  Joe’s life is also small.  Although they spark something of worth in each other, neither of them blaze through much of anything.

The other thing that doesn’t quite hold together is the story of the son, Kip, played by Edward Tournier.  It is both the writing and the acting that felt untrue.  Mr. Tournier plays the disaffected, disenfranchised, angry young man to the hilt, but plays it with the energy of an actor stretching his craft to play an angry young man rather than that of an angry young man.  It also seems that entirely too much time is spent looking at Kip’s life.  This seems to be Mabel’s story, and her story is much more compelling than Kip’s.  Showing Kip out in his life explains his anger toward life and especially toward his father, but it seems mostly a distraction.

There are some very good performances. Kelly Elizabeth plays Tricia, Kip’s young, blonde girlfriend.  She has, perhaps, the smallest part in the piece but is an actress worth watching. She played the small town rich girl slumming with the poor white trash with empathy, subtlety and just the right amount of teenaged ennui.  If the playwright had trimmed Kip’s story as I suggest, we might not have had the opportunity to see this wonderful actor in her theatrical debut.

Gina Garrison is Fran, the horny neighbor, and is also quite good. Her bitterness, her lust and her attempts to alleviate her pain are just right.  Tony Gatto is John, Mabel’s large husband.  Mr. Gatto seems to understand the loneliness and anger of an alpha male who has been completely disappointed by the smallness of his life and whose life keeps getting smaller as a result.

There are two actors who alternate in the role of Ethan, Joe’s smarmy boss at the watch company; Micah Cohen and James Pippi. Mr. Pippi played it the night I attended and he was good, funny in a dark way, and very believable in a role that could have been cliche.  I’ve met that boss.  Thankfully, I never had to work for him.  Joe Wiebe rounds out the cast as Kip’s best friend, Moe.

The lights, by Joel Daavid were quite good, with some very effective special effects.  He also did the scenic design which was interesting but didn’t quite work.  Everything was at odd angles and cut away in strange ways, including a window and a door in the floor. It was a symbol, of course, of Mabel’s life, but it didn’t seem to support the fairly realistic feel of the story.   Sound design was done by Jack Arky.  That included the telephone conversations, which were held over live telephones that actually rang.  The phone conversations were amplified, giving them the true feel of a long distance conversation. It is a convention I’ve never seen on stage and I like it a lot.

Costumes, by Louis Douglas Jacobs, were good.  Fight choreography was by Edgar Landa and was very effective, however I feared for the safety of Ms. Garrison at one point, which pulled me out of the play.

Lindsay Allbaugh directed.  There was a wonderful conceit that she employed that pulled the audience in to the story right from the moment of entering the theatre.  In a room in back, behind the kitchen, a flabby, middle-aged man in a dingy tee-shirt can just be seen, sitting in an old stuffed chair, drinking beer, with the flickering glow of a television dancing over him.  We knew exactly who he was and where we were and were excited to see this story unfold.

Supernova is performed Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 7 pm through June 27th, 2010.

The Elephant Space is located at 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, 90038, just west of Vine.

Ticket prices: $20.

Reservations online at www.plays411.com/supernova or by phone at (323) 960-4410