hyacinthmacaw If you know Cal Rep well enough to be familiar with how they are willing to employ the idiosyncrasies of the Queen Mary’s Royal Theatre, you couldn’t help but wonder whether the opening-night, curtain-up time fire alarm and call for the theatre to be evacuated were part of the show. But no, we were shuffled down the gangplank to wait for the all-clear. False alarm. False start. Let’s start again.

If you know your surrealism well enough to wonder if a play with a title like The Hyacinth Macaw is hoping to evoke via artful randomness, you’re flying pretty close to the mark. Playwright Mac Wellman puts in a lot of work getting his language just so—just so it sounds a certain way, just so it suggests more than it means, and just so it’s too random for its own good.

“I can’t follow the thread of your tale,” complains young Susannah (Anna Steers) to odd old William Hard (Jerry Prell), who’s arrived in Gradual (a city by the Bug River) from the Land of Night to deliver a letter concerning Susannah’s father, Ray (Craig Anton), speaking in expectorations of half-meaning in half-arcane verbiage. “That’s because it’s a deliberate tangle,” Hard says. This would well tell you what you’re in for over the next two hours if he’d adjusted it to say: “deliberately quasi-random tangle.”

Cal Rep handle The Hyacinth Macaw with care, which means faithfully delivering the mouthfuls of Wellman’s absurdist pith, sounding and resounding the themes he thrusts at us through a clearing in the colorful, haphazard overgrowth every eight minutes or so: “What would life be like without a fixed set of points to navigate by?” “This world as an instance of itself only.” “Who are we? Why do we talk like this?” “Don’t go and get all metaphysical on me now. Stay fixed on the here and now.” “The truth is needlework. The rest is crotchety supposition.”

In the Cal Rep press release Wellman is quoted as saying that the CROWTET, a teratology of which Macaw is a part, is about “a young woman adrift, and alienated in a world essentially gone mad.” If so (I can’t say I really see that from Macaw alone), the problem may be one covered by a grad-school English term: imitative fallacy. What it means, basically, is that if you bore people while trying to get across the idea of a character’s boredom, you’ve made a misstep. Thus do we have artistic representations of madness that are random—because, you know, it’s madness, see, so it doesn’t have to make sense. I think Wellman is guilty of something like that here.

That doesn’t stop Macaw from scoring points. Looking past some very bad wordplay that Wellman can’t resist from time to time (“You’re acting too strange for a stranger”), there’s enough cleverness to go around, plus a lot of little laughs—and some big ones. Particularly strong on this front is Anton, whose Act I befuddlement and life review is delivered with just the right obliviously musing-to-himself wonderment that we’re instantly charmed; and Simon Brooke as Mad Wu, whose do-nothing-deus ex machina moment is made with delivery and timing that earns him the night’s biggest guffaws.

Generally, director Jim Martin has done a nice job getting the cast to talk and listen to each other, even while there’s probably not an organic exchange to be found on the page. The star pupil here is Lysa Fox as Dora.

An uncredited star of the show is the lighting design, which casts the action in fey prairie sun- and moonlight, and which combines with the tastefully flat, angular set to fully highlight the finest aspects of the show. I couldn’t help thinking, “Rene Magritte, meet David Lynch.”

A problem with the show is the way it unfolds. For whatever shortcomings the script has, Act I pretty much works because the play’s themes (which never really develop but pretty much just lie there) are still new to us, and because there’s a quiet kineticism that keeps us focused. (A fantastic light-and-sound moment immediately brought Lynch’s Inland Empire to mind.) But in Act II we’re getting fed more of the same (we’re already full), plus we’re getting it comparatively statically. Having never seen the script, I cannot say whether this problem falls at the feet of Martin (who certainly deserves credit for what works), or whether Wellman wrote Martin into a corner.

The Hyacinth Macaw does not make me a fan of Mac Wellman, and yet this is not a case where I lament the script choice. It’s an unusual play by a diligent author, and Cal Rep have taken flight with the possibilities therein.

 HYACINTH MACAW CALIFORNIA REPERTORY CO. • THE ROYAL THEATRE ABOARD THE QUEEN MARY (1126 QUEENS HWY) • LONG BEACH 90802 • 562.985.5526 CALREP.ORG • 8PM WED-SAT + TUES, MARCH 8 • $15–$20 (PARKING $6–$8—BUT YOU CAN TAKE THE PASSPORT FOR FREE) • THROUGH MARCH 12