Like old-fashioned dramas, the new “Somewhere Fun” is staged in three acts with two intermissions. It also boasts two charismatic powerhouses in the leads: Kathleen Chalfant and Kate Mulgrew — the first best known for “Wit,” the second for TV’s “Star Trek: Voyager.”
But those are the only traditional elements about the disconcerting show that opened last night at the Vineyard.
Nominally, it’s about the brief reunion of two women who haven’t seen each other in a long time; we also meet some of their offspring and friends. Also, there’s a mysterious death.
But playwright Jenny Schwartz isn’t interested in telling a linear story. In fact, she’s not interested in telling a nonlinear story, either. Still, as long as you don’t work yourself up into a lather trying to make sense of it, the show casts a charming spell.
As in 2007’s “God’s Ear” — directed, like this one, by Anne Kauffman — “Somewhere Fun” is built on short scenes linked by word associations and surreal humor.
Like Edward Albee and comedian Steven Wright, Schwartz loves to use language in an absurd way. Here her riffs often start from common expressions and catchphrases like “There’s no place like home” or “Laughter is the best medicine” — “second only to morphine,” a character specifies. “And oxycodone.”
The entire cast is good but the two stars are a notch above, negotiating the highly stylized dialogue like chefs briskly filleting sentences with sharp knives.
Mulgrew plays Rosemary Rappaport, an Upper East Side real-estate VP who runs into an old friend, Evelyn Armstrong (Chalfant).
The encounter is brief, dominated by the agent’s motormouth chatter: “It’s me! Rosemary! Rosemary Rappaport! From a hundred thousand years ago! When the world was in black and white! When the world was in black and white, and I still had a waistline! Remember? Evelyn? Remember my waistline? I was practically Scarlett O’Hara in those days. Scarlett O’Hara? From ‘Gone With the Wind’? No?” And so on.
Evelyn, crumpled in a wheelchair, can’t squeeze in a word. She’ll make up for it later, as we discover her ailment.
“Everything happens for a reason,” she says dryly. “With the exception of anal cancer.”
Death and mortality loom large in “Somewhere Fun,” but Schwartz goes at them from unexpected angles. This is the kind of show where, when a character melts down, the only thing she leaves behind is a puddle of black goo and a skull. Then, stagehands in biohazard clean it up.
This is all surprisingly entertaining, and oddly touching as well. The show may look like an exercise in sterile brain twisters, but in its own warped way, it creates genuine emotion.