LIFE MIMICS ART FOR ‘POSTCARDS’ CAST

At the outset of “Three Postcards,” the new musical play running at South Coast Repertory, three women enter a Manhattan bistro called Chelsea Moon. They sit beneath a painting of a huge dream figure that looks like it floated out of a Chagall. Before long, the image is the only aspect of the setting or the meal that retains its serenity: The old friends’ table breaks into three parts; time falls out of order. But there were no breakaway tables or time warps when the play’s three actresses--Karen Trott, Jane Galloway and Maureen Silliman--met recently for lunch at a similarly chi-chi restaurant in Costa Mesa to discuss the work, written by Craig Lucas. Critics have praised their performances and the quirky lyricism of the play, which includes nine songs by composer Craig Carnelia.

The dialogue of “Three Postcards” is full of the fragments and emotional surges that form contemporary encounters, the kinds in which “I mean” and “you know” often pass for a completed thought and everybody gets excited about what they think they understand. While the actresses were more articulate than their characters, at times the Costa Mesa lunch echoed the play’s uneasy attachment to reality. “This is astonishing,” said Galloway, in the overeager tone of her character, Big Jane, as she looked around Alfredo’s restaurant. “Isn’t it weirdly reminiscent of where we spend every evening?”

She was twisting in her chair to look behind her at a painting of some sprawling, vaguely artistic orchids.

“The floor is flat,” said Trott, contrasting Alfredo’s to Chelsea Moon, where a slanted stage gives the imagined restaurant its surreal yet familiar quality.

“The Chelsea Moon is not a real place,” said Galloway. “We’ve eaten there in our imaginations. We’ve eaten there over and over. It has a very eclectic menu.”

The Chelsea Moon also has an unusual waiter, who sets the tone for the rest of the play when he leans over to Silliman’s character and whispers: “I hate you.”

But when Silliman described the scene to Carlos, the living Alfredo’s waiter, his puzzled response was, “Oh . . . I hope you like everything.”

Carlos also didn’t dance or sing or ask to see anybody’s underwear, as does Lucas’ fictional waiter. “This waiter isn’t also playing our fathers, our husbands, every man in our life,” said Galloway, as Carlos handed her a menu.

“You learn so much about people just from the way that they do things like order a meal,” Trott said. “And you learn as much about them as if they stood there and talked about their life story for two hours, and now the waiter’s going to come, and we’re all going to do it.”

Everybody studied the menu. Trott ordered first and took forever, just as her character does in the play. “You know what?” she said after a while, “I still don’t know what I’m going to have.”

After asking questions about three specials, Trott ignored them all and returned to the menu for angel hair pasta. “It’s true,” she said later. “I am very indecisive.”

On the play’s surface, the friends compliment each other and speak well of their spouses and children. But there are other layers. Silliman’s character imagines that she is dancing with her husband when he says he can’t stand her. “You’ll always be little,” he declares. “People are constantly trying to find the good answer, the right way out of something,” said Trott, as Carlos brought her lunch plate. “They say, ‘Oh, no, I’m fine, really, really, it’s great,’ but you know that it isn’t. There’s an attempt to make things positive.”

Said Galloway, starting to eat: “All of us are sitting here today having this conversation, but we all have past relationships in our lives which inform the way we behave with each other right now.” The past lives of two of the three actresses include productions of other Craig Lucas plays. Galloway and Silliman appeared in “Blue Window” at SCR and elsewhere, and both are scheduled to be seen nationally when the play airs on public television in June. The three actresses, all in their mid-30s, live in Manhattan, where Trott has performed on and off Broadway.

Silliman, who described “Three Postcards” as more hopeful, more celebratory than “Blue Window,” said the new work is particularly difficult to perform.

“My dialogue isn’t constructed so that I say, ‘Are you OK,’ and Jane says, ‘Uh-huh,’ ” Silliman said. “She has to split five ‘uh-huhs’ into one long speech of mine. It’s very difficult.”

“We just drilled it and drilled it and drilled it,” said Trott, adding that the challenge was compounded because the play went through frequent revisions. Is it easier for an actor to play the “natural” behavior of a character in 1980s America than a role rooted in another time? “We’re playing the objectives of the characters as opposed to trying to be natural,” said Galloway. “It’s like playing a drunk person. You can’t try to be drunk. Drunk people usually try to act like they’re not drunk.”

When dessert arrived, very little seemed similar to the Lucas script. Silliman, the only person who orders dessert in the play, had none at Alfredo’s. Nobody put on coats and hats to head out into a cold New York day. No piano player refrained a melody that brought the occasion full circle.

One thing, however, was the same as in the play: Everyone smiled and waved as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.