A Midwestern mother and her businesswoman daughter travel to a small American city. Their purpose? To identify the body of a family member who committed suicide.
Hilarity ensues.
If that sounds off-kilter, well, so is “The Fall to Earth.” In this work, which debuted at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company before opening here, playwright Joel Drake Johnson tosses in both silliness and dysfunctional-family drama. More often than not, he drops the ball.
The opening scene painfully illustrates the naiveté of the mother, Fay (Deborah Hedwall), who’s apparently never stayed at a hotel before, and who marvels at such things as a writing desk.
She and her worldly daughter Rachel (Jolie Curtsinger) don’t get along, especially when Fay starts sniffing Rachel’s bra and begins toying with her cellphone.
They finally make it to the morgue, where a sympathetic police officer, Terry (Amelia Campbell), gives them the sordid details — Fay is mainly interested in what TV show the man was watching when he killed himself.
Terry, who has the gravitas of television’s Barney Fife, later stops by their hotel room, turkey meatloaf dinners in hand.
Things get tense when Fay becomes a little too physical in her desire for more information. “Don’t pinch me,” Terry wails. “I’m an officer of the law!”
A more skillful playwright — think Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart”— can effectively navigate the fine line between farce and tragedy.
But no such finesse is on display here. And it doesn’t help that the characters are either profoundly irritating (Fay), unlikable (Rachel) or just silly (Terry).
By play’s end, we’ve come to identify with the suicide victim.
He took the easy way out.