The aptly titled “Reckless” is truth in advertising: It’s what makes the play such a wild theatrical ride, and it’s what leaves you feeling a bit whiplashed in the end.
Wickedly funny while still deliciously disturbing, “Reckless” is a surreal black comedy that sucks you in with its laughs and whimsy. Then it intentionally deposits you next to a pay phone on a snowy Christmas Eve, without shoes and without a dime for the phone. It leaves you melancholy. Cold. But with the opportunity to start your life anew, more purposefully and meaningfully than before.
Why, it’s the most twisted variation on “A Christmas Carol” imaginable. And it makes for a wonderfully discombobulating evening with the Denver Center Theatre Company.
Playwright Craig Lucas’ protagonist is a silly, vapid and utterly recognizable suburban housewife named Rachel. It’s Christmas Eve and she’s giddy with the saccharine spirit of the season. Her children are tucked in bed and she’s prattling euphorically on about sugarplums and such when her catatonic husband Tom blurts out that he’s hired a hit man to kill her. In five minutes. So you know . . . shut up and go! Wicked, yes. But legally defensible? To be sure.
The next two hours are a theatrical joy ride on an icy road, with set pieces cleverly appearing and disappearing as we follow Rachel’s Kerouc-like, warp-speed odyssey to wherever and whatever her new life will bring.
She’s on the run from a gunman, yes, but really on the run from the lie that we ever really know anyone. She’s taken in by a kind stranger named Lloyd Bophtelophti and his paraplegic girlfriend, Pooty, who are both harboring their own secrets. Rachel’s journey includes her first-ever job and visits with several wacky psychoanalysts before climaxing in a fated confrontation with her past — an unsettling reunion that’s as off-kilter as a fever dream.
That Rachel morphs so fully from the cloyingly perky “momsy” we first meet is tribute to a remarkably honest performance by Julia Motyka. And yet there’s something about Rachel we can never abide — those two young boys she’s abandoned in her narcissistic search for self.
It’s the fault of the play that it spins out of control at the end. And when it comes to a stop, we still feel for Rachel but no longer understand her. It’s as if Motyka has wrapped our hearts with rubber bands and then snapped them.
Lucas meant it that way. His play is filled with characters who have been abandoned — and abandoned others in return, like the cycle of abuse.
Even though divorce is never mentioned in “Reckless,” written in 1988, this is really a play about the fractured families that exponentiated in America beginning in the ’70s.
In truth, Lucas wrote “Reckless” in response to the AIDS crisis, but today it plays like an answer to the millions of post-“Mad Men” American housewives who broke free from the insignificance of their domestic lives — and fled. The brilliance of the play is how Lucas both acknowledges the validity of those journeys and the consequences they wrought.
It’s almost unheard-of for the DCTC to stage a popular contemporary title that’s been available to other local theater companies for 20 years. There are more urgent topics to be explored. But it’s a treat to see a title we know so well performed to the highest production standards.
Scott Schwartz (son of Stephen) has directed a fluid and fanciful play that’s greatly enhanced with evocative visual projections and delicious turns by a remarkable supporting cast, all playing multiple roles. They include Jeffrey M. Bender as lovable Lloyd (even though he’s deserted his own wife and kids), Drew Cortese as Rachel’s husband and two damaged sons; Tyrone Mitchell Henderson channeling his inner Tim Meadows as a scene-stealing game-show host; and company stalwart Leslie O’Carroll (Pooty), a master at bringing out the humanity and comedy in deeply damaged women.
For all the laughs, so many questions linger in this play’s wake. Most unsettling: Is the past something you wake up from . . . or is it something you wake up to?
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Reckless” *** (out of four stars)
Black comedy. Presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company at the Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets. Written by Craig Lucas. Directed by Scott Schwartz. Starring Julia Motyka, Jeffrey M. Bender, Leslie O’Carroll and Kathy Brady. Through Dec. 18. 2 hours. 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. $18-$57. 303-893-4100 (800-641-1222 outside Denver) or
