Impressive Ground Crew Keeps ‘Cosmonaut’ Aloft

Rarely does a production get the spectacular technical support given to the U.S. debut of “The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union” at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Forum. Fortunately, David Greig’s script justifies the means.

Scottish writer Greig offers a sometimes murky, episodic work about alienation, deprivation and, especially, lack of communication. As his central metaphor, he has two Russian cosmonauts adrift in space, unable to contact Earth and apparently forgotten after 12 years. Their stories link to, allude to and parallel those of several couples on the ground.

One spaceman’s daughter has become an erotic dancer and paramour to a Scottish bureaucrat. The bureaucrat, unhappy with his wife and life, fakes a suicide and disappears. His girlfriend begins a lesbian affair with another dancer, then attaches to a Norwegian diplomat. The abandoned wife, a speech therapist, is prodded by a policewoman into searching for her husband or for clues as to why he seemingly walked into the sea. In France, she meets a scientist who once helped build rockets but now just tries to connect with extraterrestrial life.

What these people have in common, it’s clear, is a problem communicating--be it different languages, disparate perceptions or a disease eroding the mind. They, and by extension all of us, inhabit separate orbits, sometimes intersecting but usually solitary and never far from loss. In the overall tapestry of isolation, however, Greig ironically weaves threads of commonality--watery suicides, jaunts to the Isle of Skye, a Bob Dylan song, identical descriptions of a woman.

Even less serious scenes--like the cosmonauts humorously discussing their orbital sex lives, which involve only a deck of nudie playing cards--further the theme of loneliness.

The stories literally revolve around Mark Wendland’s dramatic set. In front of a wall bisected into orbit-tracking map and star-spangled sky, a central pole serves as axis, supporting rotating arms. The top one holds the cosmonauts’ globe of a spaceship, and the ones below carry key props like a TV that analogously loses its signal, a satellite dish and a large cube used to represent indoor or outdoor spaces.

Wendland’s work is splendidly enhanced by Geoff Korf’s dim-outer-space to flashy-nightclub lighting; Darron L. West’s unerring sounds and music; and Christal Weatherly’s appropriate costuming.

Commend director Neel Keller for assembling the remarkable tech team and for a cast that excellently handles the multiplicity of roles and accents. Noteworthy are Irina Bjorklund, as the daughter-dancer and a policewoman; Gretchen Lee Krich as the wife and a dancer; and Mark Nelson as the husband and the UFO researcher. Nelson and John Feltch, in one of his many bartender guises, earned extra credit Sunday evening for maintaining their composure and ad-libbing deftly after a bottle accidentally tumbled and shattered on the floor.

A couple of caveats: Greig relies heavily on the f-word and has the characters smoke extensively. The first, apparently to illustrate the barrenness of most people’s vocabularies, is only a minor problem of aesthetics. The second, even in the well-ventilated Forum, could be a major problem for asthmatics.

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* “The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union,” Mandell Weiss Forum, UCSD campus, San Diego. Tuesday-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 3. $19-$39. (858) 550-1010. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.