‘Fred’s Diner’:
Magic Theatre serves up an inventive, twisting plot.
The menu is on a chalkboard at “Fred’s Diner,” but don’t be surprised if the dishes contain ever more unexpected elements in the American premiere that opened the Magic Theatre’s season Friday, Sept. 25. English playwright Penelope Skinner’s Bay Area debut draws you in with sharp, well-observed comedy of the low-wage working world in a roadside diner, but Skinner is merely laying the table for the darker, unsettling and more substantial material in store.
It’s a strong opener for the Magic’s first season of all-female playwrights, though it could be a bit stronger. If the cast is slightly uneven and the action sputters a bit in the first act, the various tensions gathering beneath its surface become thoroughly gripping
soon enough. Not to mention creepy, in some respects liberating but laced with dashed hopes and redolent of enduring aspects of gender and class inequity.
“Diner” is also a mystery meal to such an extent that we can’t reveal much about its inventively twisting plot. But it probably isn’t giving too much away to say that its key focus is on the women in the diner owned and operated by the very popular, avuncular Fred (a terrific Donald Sage Mackay). At least one writer in the United Kingdom has called up-and-coming playwright Skinner “our leading young feminist writer,” and the story revolves around long-standing women’s issues from employment to certain forms of abuse.
That there will be an element of violence should be no surprise, given the grisly tableau with which Magic Artistic Director Loretta Greco’s production opens. Nor is it accidental that Skinner has set the story in a 1950s-Americana themed English diner near Oxford (the brightly detailed set is by Erik Flatmo), just before Christmas. The retro milieu and the songs blasting from the large jukebox ( James Brown, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby) reflect the underlying sexism lingering in the landscape.
That’s the world in which these women live and dream of better things, if not necessarily bigger. Melissa (Katharine Chin), Fred’s teenage daughter, has applied to nearby Oxford with the idea of studying law and working for “justice.” She’s waiting to hear whether she got in. The somewhat older Chloe ( Jessi Campbell), a college graduate just returned from a trip to Asia and full of her own worldliness, aspires to be “the hero” of her story, though her current aspirations are a return to Thailand. Heather ( Julia McNeal), the oldest and least educated, has her sights set on the “manageress” position Fred is about to fill.
She’s not likely to get it. We already know that Fred is set on somebody “sexy, young ... easy on the eye,” because “I know what people want.” But though we can see Heather has a temper, she’s too grateful to Fred to make waves. Nobody else would hire her after she’d served her sentence for killing her abusive husband. Besides, she has another possible option — weighed, denied and desired in McNeal’s richly layered, watchful performance, with so much more seething beneath the surface than Heather is willing to let on. Weary truck driver Sunny (Terry Lamb), a regular customer, keeps asking her for a date.
Lamb, oddly cast as an Indian (for a play in which ethnicity is something of an issue), plays the role with a gentle, easy naturalness and no hint of stereotyping. Campbell is delightfully opinionated, “posh” and self-absorbed as Chloe. Nick Day is appealingly clueless and borderline dangerous as Greg, another frequent visitor if not exactly a customer. Chin is aptly hopeful, troubled and torn as Melissa, though there are emotional levels to her role she hasn’t articulated yet.
McNeal has for her role, though. As has Mackay, in a riveting portrait of the varied aspects of the gregarious Fred. On the whole, the Magic’s “Diner” is chilling proof of how wrong Chloe is when she says, “Stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore. It’s the 21st century!”