What a weird play “The Jacksonian” is. It’s not great — at times it’s not even good — but Beth Henley’s new drama sure sticks in your head. And that’s something most shows don’t do — easy come, easy go, including the starry-but-Teflon “Betrayal.”
Not that this production for the New Group, in a 199-seat house, lacks star power: It’s just that Bill Pullman, Ed Harris and Amy Madigan fall more in the character-actor camp than the TMZ one.
Pullman is nearly unrecognizable from his presidential roles — in “Independence Day” and TV’s “1600 Penn” — as Fred Weber, the mutton-chopped bartender of the title’s dingy motel, where the action’s set in 1964. Fred doesn’t say much, and when he does, his waxy face barely moves. The guy has a way of crawling under your skin.
As soon as we meet him, it’s clear this isn’t the Henley of Southern-fried dramedies like “Crimes of the Heart” and “The Miss Firecracker Contest.” Her new show, directed by Robert Falls, is more David Lynch crossed with Flannery O’Connor.
Fred’s hardly an ideal companion for a shy 16-year-old girl like Rosy Perch (Juliet Brett), who’s been hanging out at the Jacksonian a lot, often doing her homework by the bar, ever since her father moved in.
Dad is a dentist named Bill (Harris), who was kicked out of their home by wife Susan (Madigan, Harris’ longtime spouse). He hit her and now he’s paying for it, living in a rented dump. “This place is depressing,” Susan says of the motel. “The carpet is the color of despair.”
Because the play starts off with Bill in a bloodied shirt, then dips into flashbacks, we know the sordid conclusion from the get-go.
Except things aren’t quite the way they look. Especially since a murder case is tacked on to the domestic drama, with the casually racist maid, Eva White (Glenne Headly), involved in both stories.
Toying with chronology, the show keeps feeding us partial information — even if this leads to frustration during the saggy middle part. But things pick up when we head into the savage finale.
A welcome streak of surreal dark humor helps the patchiest bits go down. In one long manic scene, Bill lugs around a canister of laughing gas and gets high. And the script is peppered with evocative lines — Fred says that Eva “smells like broken-up crayons in a dirty room.”
With its lost souls stuck in limbo, the Jacksonian feels like purgatory. Still, you may want to check in for a bit.