SEATTLE — Playwright Steven Dietz’s new production is a laugh-out-loud amusement park ride where the comedy spins out of control like a bumper car.
“Becky’s New Car” is witty and droll, with delicious deadpan humor and U-turn plot twists. It’s really just the kind of amusement park ride that when you get off, you want to get right back on. You want to experience those hilarious highs again and again, like some joke junkie.
The play runs through Nov. 16 at ACT Theatre.
The plot focuses on Becky Foster, a 40-something mother and wife who has a decent life working in an auto dealership, a decent husband Joe who is a roofer and a decent, though free-loading, psych-major son living in her basement. But Becky senses something is missing. That something enters the dealership in the form of widower millionaire Walter Flood, who falls for Becky at first sight. Through a miscommunication that is not corrected, Walter believes Becky is also widowed. That’s where Becky must decide whether to put on the brakes or power forward with a different life.
Throughout this story, playwright Dietz triumphantly doles out zingers like tokens. It’s weird, then, that in the program notes Dietz comes close to almost apologizing for “Becky’s New Car.” He said comedy isn’t easy to create and he humbly, I trust, credits Seattle’s fine actors and ACT Theatre for making his work a success, should that amazing miracle actually happen.
Well, quit your worrying, Mr. Dietz. Though you asserted in the program notes that comedy is the theater’s gold standard, you created something very, very shiny.
And funny. Like this exchange:
“Got anything stronger?”
“Like what?”
“How about a pistol?”
But it turns out there’s more under the hood of “Becky’s New Car” than just the comedy. The story has depth. It has themes like confronting the unexpected. It has conflict such as a woman being pulled in two directions. It has, like Yogi Berra once suggested, a person coming to a fork in the road and taking it.
There’s also a lot of audience participation in “Becky’s New Car,” with the cast crossing the fourth wall to occasionally offer drinks, the sports section or paperwork. Most of that was good stuff, though possibly a bit overdone, almost stretching close to stunt theater.
As Dietz mentioned in the program notes, there are remarkable actors at ACT. That proved true once again as those remarkable actors got behind the wheel of “Becky’s New Car” to drive it into the winner’s circle. The cast includes Kimberly King as the incredibly whimsical Becky; deadpan master Charles Leggett as Joe; Michael Winters as the wonderfully daft Walter Flood; the comically reliable R. Hamilton Wright as Steve; Suzanne Bouchard at her sardonic best as Ginger, and delightful Benjamin Harris and Anna-Lisa Carlson as Chris Foster and Kenni Flood.
The staging for “Becky’s New Car” — the work of scenic designer William Bloodgood — is as finely tuned as the cast, stylistically spare with great touches like the dangling auto dealership signs that rise up and down when needed. And at the end of this funny ride, the cutest little car pops out of the floor, as cute as any bumper car in any amusement park, beckoning us to take it out for a spin.
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