STAGE WEST: Backyard Renaissance's "The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens"

Jessica John and MJ Seiber in "The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens."                         Photo by Daren Scott

            Eat your heart out. That’s what keeps going through my mind now that I’ve seen “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens.”
            I’m not going to explain that, just as I’m not going to attempt to explain much of what goes down in this world-premiere production at Backyard Renaissance Theatre Company’s Tenth Avenue Arts Center home.
            Playwright Francis Gercke, who is also Backyard’s artistic director, leans on “magical realism” when describing the two-hander he started working on during the COVID-19 pandemic. (No wonder “Dark Heart” has the pulse of a fever dream running throughout it.)
            Magical realism, a device most commonly associated with the work of Latin and South American writers, posits an external world in which the extraordinary intrudes upon the otherwise ordinary – and it’s accepted among its characters without shock or amazement. Think Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” or Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate” or Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits.”
            Gercke’s play (his second) certainly comes with an ordinary setting – a dingy, trash-strewn trailer somewhere in the Southwest desert, the furnishings of which by comparison make my very first apartment look like a suite at the Ritz Carlton. For extraordinary there’s a phone that rings though it’s off the hook, cartons of eggs and cans of Chock full o’ Nuts that materialize in the fridge or in cupboards, and by the way, a sliding opening in the roof atop which is … alien life?
            So I don’t know if this is magical realism as much as it is sci-fantasy, psychodrama or the sort of just-run-with-it spookiness on which the late great David Lynch thrived and into which the likes of J.J. Abrams has ventured.
            There is a premise here. Cindy (Jessica John) is inhabiting this squalid trailer by her lonesome when almost immediately there’s an angry banging on the door. After seeming to take a few shots at the arrival through a window, she reluctantly admits an excited, wounded Dooley Stevens (MJ Seiber). He’s there, he growls at her, to get back something she stole from him.
            That’s just the beginning of a winding, twisting, turning narrative that is variously unpredictable and unfathomable. Intentionally so. If we never truly get to know who Cindy is (even if we do learn why she’s holed up in this trailer) or who or what Dooley is, that’s just one more mystery, one more groping in the darkness, one more plummet down the elevator shaft.
            It’s a testament to the stamina of both actors and the chemistry they share that for two hours they’re able to maintain peak emotional pitch while also exercising physicality when called for and not receding into cartoon characters. Cindy and Dooley are real enough – everything around them? Jury’s out on that.
            Like many newborn plays, “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens” could use some refining. One surprise or stunner follows hard upon another, to the extent that even as a wild ride it can be excessive. As the story chugs along fueling apprehension one’s nerves are raw, though the brain may be sore.
            Just don’t think it through? Don’t try to figure it out? Not so easy for somebody like me, but then I’m one who can’t resist seeking order in chaos.
            “Dark Heart” is Hannah Meade’s Backyard directorial debut. This affords me an opening to congratulate her on recently winning a Craig Noel Award from the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle (of which I am a member) for directing Chalk Circle Collective’s “Constellations.” Also kudos to “Dark Heart’s” scenic designer Mathys Herbert, who took home a Craig Noel for his work on Cygnet Theatre’s “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.”
            “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens” runs through March 15 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center, downtown.