Review: Where the middle-class dream turns into the world’s worst game show

The presidential election results aren’t directly referenced in “The Super Variety Match Bonus Round!” but they add prescient urgency and relevance to Deb Hiett’s quirky new culture war satire at the Met Theatre in L.A.

The play’s lively world premier staging by Cameron Watson for Rogue Machine Theatre wittily envisions a bankrupt middle-class dream as a TV game show with unknown rules, in which nothing is fair.

The analogy is initially figurative, as the play opens with an all too realistic scenario in the modest home of a retired couple in rural Texas. Narcoleptic Mags (Bonnie Bailey-Reed), a former English teacher, has given up on life after the suicide of their troubled veteran son. She spends pointless days napping and watching 1970s game show reruns.

Her caregiver husband, Ernest (Mark L. Taylor), desperate to supplement their inadequate fixed income and shake up their stagnant routine, enlists the help of their Internet-savvy mail carrier, Dolores (Paula Christensen), to post a room for rent during a nearby music festival.

What turns up in answer to the online ad is a flamboyantly androgynous millennial by the name of Chrz (Victoria Ortiz), who embodies everything Mags can’t stand about the flip side of the generational divide.

On opening night, the play’s sharply observed culture clashes would have benefited from tighter comic timing in the early going. However, members of the ensemble gained more solid satirical footing as they traded barbs and biases. Eventually, pharmaceuticals transport the couple into a real-life game show — a dazzling reality shift masterminded by scenic designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz.

Dolores reappears as the charismatically pushy game show host, and Chrz becomes the vapid spokesmodel as the bewildered Mags and Ernest compete in the increasingly high-stakes, soul-baring rounds of the appropriately titled show “It’s a Scary, Scary World.” Though the conceit grows a bit labored at times, it’s an amusing and ingenious avenue of self-exploration that for some in the audience will hold a measure of hope in a time of jeopardy.

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“The Super Variety Match Bonus Round!”

Where: MET Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8:30 p.m. Saturdays and Mondays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 19.

Tickets: $34.99

Information: (855) 585-5185 or www.roguemachinetheatre.com

Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

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