From all appearances, Kenneth Calloway is the kind of oddball you would want to steer well clear of. Wild-eyed and radiating a frenetic intensity, he wears a fleece-lined baby-blue earflap hat so oversize that he can’t help looking tiny underneath. Also, there is the matter of the classified newspaper ad he placed.
“Wanted: someone to go back in time with me,” it reads. “This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91, Oceanview, Washington 99393. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before — safety not guaranteed.”
Maybe he is a genius; more likely he is unhinged. Either way, as embodied by Taylor Trensch in “Safety Not Guaranteed,” the bumpy new musical comedy that opened on Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he is riveting. Earnest, obsessive and vulnerable, he is soon so endearing that you may have the impulse, as I did, to keep him safe — from himself, and from the team of Seattle Magazine journalists who are pursuing an article about him.
Directed by the Obie Award winner Lee Sunday Evans, the musical is adapted from the offbeat 2012 film of the same name written by Derek Connolly, which starred Mark Duplass as Kenneth and Aubrey Plaza as Darius, a young journalist who bonds with him.
Like the movie, the stage version (book by Nick Blaemire, music and lyrics by Ryan Miller) is about loneliness, lost chances and the longing for do-overs. It has an appealingly indie Pacific Northwest sound and an elemental goofiness, but the show hasn’t yet found its shape. (Music direction is by Cynthia Meng, who leads an onstage five-piece band.)
Darius (Nkeki Obi-Melekwe), the writer who spotted the ad, is joined on her reporting trip by Jeff (Pomme Koch), her shallow dirtbag of an editor, and Arnau (Rohan Kymal), a shy, brainy researcher. Once in Oceanview, the three operate unscrupulously in undercover mode, never disclosing to Kenneth who they really are or what they’re up to.
“I break rules for breakfast,” Darius tells Kenneth, and that much at least is true.
More thornily, she has misrepresented herself as a prospective time-travel partner answering his ad.
He, testing her: “You ever faced certain death?”
She, parrying logically: “If it was so certain — I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
Darius is secretly hoping that Kenneth’s time-travel machine works. When he enlists Darius in a caper to steal a needed power source, she acquiesces. Like Kenneth, who is desperate to repair his broken present by changing what led to it, Darius has a catastrophe in her past that she would risk everything to go back and avert.
We don’t get even a glimmer of Darius’s trauma, though, until late in the show, which is not as interested in her as in Kenneth. Obi-Melekwe gives an admirable performance, but she has less to grab onto than Trensch does.
Arnau, the researcher, gets a charming romance arc with Tristan (John-Michael Lyles), a flirty librarian, and the scene where Kenneth puts Darius through basic training is ridiculous fun. So is Kenneth’s fabulous hat. (Costumes are by Sarita Fellows.) There is a laxity to the show’s construction, though, and the attention it gives Jeff — who came on the trip to hook up with a local ex (Ashley Pérez Flanagan) — seems a waste of energy.
The score includes some lovely songs, especially the one that Kenneth plays on a zither, but a surprising number of them don’t spring from characters’ emotions.
In the opening scene, Darius pitches her story idea to Jeff and gets a yes. That’s huge for her — a first from him, and elating, one would think. But in the song that immediately follows, she laments her terrible job, her terrible life and the zombie pressures of capitalist conformity.
It doesn’t sound like it comes from Darius. And it sets the wrong tone for the show.
Also vexing is the musical’s obliviousness to how journalism is done, and the ethics that are meant to guide it. It’s not that the magazine staffers need to follow journalistic norms — if they did, there goes the plot — but they should give the impression of knowing which lines they’re crossing.
It seems nitpicky to insist on grounding a time-travel tale in reality, but the fantastical pops in contrast with the real. Get the audience to believe the believable first, and then get us to keep believing.
Evans manages that beautifully at the production’s ebullient end, its best crafted moment. The audience exits the BAM Strong on a high.
Outside, I caught myself humming the final song. And thinking that the experience of an untried show like this feels different at the BAM Strong than it might on a stage where we’re more used to seeing brand-new work, or brand-new work by artists without immense cultural cachet.
As BAM shifts the way it operates in straitened times, there is, for sure, the matter of adjusting expectations.
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