‘Mayday! Mayday!’ Deals in War Bonds : Performance: Songs and readings, part of ‘Making Scenes’ series, stress conflicts’ effects on relationships.

The title of the show--”Mayday! Mayday!”--suggests some kind of emergency. And maybe it is just that, given the idea of a performance yoking Mother’s Day with Memorial Day.

But for Douglas Rowe and Mark Turnbull, longtime collaborators who will appear Sunday at the Engman International Gallery as the third offering of the holiday-themed “Making Scenes” series, the logic of combining reflections on motherhood and wartime seemed a natural.

“We thought, Why not do both?” Rowe says. “We want to establish the bond of motherhood emotionally, then deal with the ruminations of war and how it affects primal relationships under the stress of war.”

In “Mayday! Mayday!”--net proceeds of which will go to the “Laguna for L.A.” fund to rebuild areas of Los Angeles destroyed by the recent riots--Turnbull will perform his own songs on guitar, and Rowe will read excerpts from the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., Walt Whitman, Stephen Vincent Benet, Malcolm X, Robinson Jeffers and others.

“I’m hesitant to say what songs I’ll be doing,” says Turnbull, 42, the former music director of the Laguna Playhouse. “I’ve written a batch of them . . . all in different styles. I’m also going to use traditional songs--’The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’--to underscore the poems Doug is doing.”

The show will also feature excerpts from the Urantia Book, which Turnbull describes as “a book of revelations” handed down by a spiritual medium.

“Urantia is the name of (Earth) as far as the other planets are concerned,” he says. “We’re the only people who refer to it as the Earth.”

Pressed to explain further, Turnbull opted not to. He did say, however, that the excerpts from the Urantia Book are not mystical texts but “very practical, nuts-and-bolts kind of things.” (It is a 2,100-page volume published in the 1950s that contains views on religion, brotherhood and philosophy as formulated by members of a study group that called itself the Urantia Brotherhood, according to an obituary on one of the group’s founders.)

Rowe, who retired last year as artistic director of the Laguna Playhouse to pursue a career as an actor and screenwriter, and Turnbull have collaborated previously on two original musicals: “Dora Hand,” about the adventures of a 19th-Century opera singer from Boston who was shot to death in Dodge City, and “Manet,” about the life of the famous 19th-Century French painter. Both musicals were produced by the Playhouse, “Dora Hand” in 1984 and “Manet” in 1989.

Despite his longtime association with Turnbull, Rowe says “Mayday! Mayday!” will mark their first appearance together as performers.

Previous offerings in the “Making Scenes” series were Mary Anne McGarry’s “Honeymoon in Galway” and Jonelle Allen’s “Easter on Sugarhill.” The final presentation will be McGarry’s “The European Connection” on June 28.