Christine Lahti and Reed Birney host a surreal dinner party in Adam Rapp’s latest. (Kevin Thomas Garcia)
Not only is Adam Rapp prolific, but you never know what he’s going to come up with next.
In the past 18 months alone, he delivered the censorship drama “The Metal Children”; combined three plays set in different eras, including a scary future, into “The Hallway Trilogy”; and reworked “Animals & Plants,” a surreal locked-motel-room mystery.
Rapp’s latest, “Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling,” shares the same off-kilter sensibility and dark humor as his previous pieces, but it’s also the most brazenly bizarre thing he’s ever done — like Luis Bunuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” transposed to the land of Brooks Brothers and Rolex watches, where financial scandals lurk in the background.
More specifically, we’re in the Connecticut house of Sandra and Bertram Cabot (Christine Lahti and Reed Birney), as the well-heeled couple hosts a party for their friends Celeste and Dirk von Stofenberg (Betsy Aidem and Cotter Smith). The table is set with crystal and linens, Sandra is decked out in a Chanel suit, and the crisply uniformed maid, Wilma (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), declaims sonnets.
Yet everybody’s behavior is off in a way that’s hard to pinpoint. It’s like milk on the verge of going sour: Something’s not quite right.
Dirk is a polite blank, and looks vaguely sedated. Sandra combines an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia — “Borneo is the third-largest island in the world” — with a potty mouth and a death stare. She’s hot in a steely way, and she could eat you alive.
After polite if slightly incongruous chitchat, dinner begins in earnest after the kids make their entrance: arty neurotic Cora Cabot (Katherine Waterston, looking like a Goth Zooey Deschanel) and suicidal James von Stofenberg (Shane McRae).
Rapp and director Neil Pepe expertly weave comedy and coiled nastiness in this Atlantic Theater production, especially when Sandra puts down her meek husband. “You were the toast of New Haven, Dirk,” she says. “Bertram was the crouton.” Lahti, imperial throughout, has wicked fun with these lines.
Mind you, actual violence doesn’t erupt, unless you count a frenzied bout of copulation on the dinner table.
But then, feral behavior isn’t so odd from a family that keeps a lioness in the basement — in addition to the human one, Sandra, prowling above.
Eventually it feels as if Rapp is trying a little too hard, and after 90 minutes, the finale lands in a rush. But if you want to watch end times in New England, this show gives you front-row seats.