Shooting the Moon, but Falling Short

During the Saturday matinee of Jose Rivera’s new play “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” it didn’t take long for a fair number of older ticket holders, perhaps made nervous by words like “wet” and “moist” and “juicy” heard outside the context of a cooking show, to vote with their feet.

In the smaller of South Coast Repertory’s two stages, with the audience seated on three sides of the playing area, it’s especially easy to spot The Disgusted Ones, fleeing. What can you say? Walkouts happen. They happen with great shows and terrible ones and ‘tweeners such as Rivera’s latest, one of his less potent, despite the sex talk alternately blunt and metaphoric.

In its final minutes, “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot” seems to find itself, at least as seen in the SCR world premiere staging directed by Juliette Carrillo. A sad and lovely spell is cast on two tenuous pairs of lovers living in the desert near Barstow. One is an army sergeant and his wife, on the brink of probable break-up. The other is a house cat and the ghost of a coyote, played by humans, dancing in the moonlight.

En route to this coda, Rivera plays a game of checkers--red square realism, black square surrealism. The approach feels compromised, a way of slipping a little craziness past the guard dog. “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot” could be a lot crazier, more disorienting and dreamlike--and it should be. As it is, the play about the husband and wife competes, wanly, with the play about the cat and the coyote.

It begins with Cat (Svetlana Efremova) and Coyote (Victor Mack), the domesticated animal and the panting desert creature. Above them the violin-playing Moon (Robert Montano) watches as Coyote promises to make Cat “scream so hard your ancestors hear you.”

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Then we meet Cat’s owner, Gabriela (Ana Ortiz), talking to the Moon, wondering if her husband has stopped dreaming about her. She fends off the 14-year-old advances of the neighbor kid, Martin (Wells Rosales). In Act 2, Gabriela’s Gulf War veteran husband Benito (Montano again, this time without the Moon’s Salvador Dali mustache) returns home from three weeks of California desert training.

The separations have taken their toll. Gabriela, a part-time Costco employee and former hard-luck teen, has had it with Barstow. Benito harbors nightmares of a Gulf War secret he’s in no mood to reveal. The cat’s missing--for good?

Rivera’s earlier works traffic in wide varieties of the mythic, from the storybook fables of “Giants Have Us in Their Books” to the apocalyptic urban paranoia of “Marisol” to the gentler games with time played in “Cloud Tectonics.” In “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” Gabriela senses that the cactuses are moving closer to the house, and that Barstow has been taken over by vampires. The male characters are less fettered by poetry and paranoia. They’re just horny.

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Rivera’s an accomplished dreamscape architect when he’s cooking, but the structure of “References to Salvador Dali” holds him in check. Also, he errs in making Benito an insufferable schmuck, badly undermining Gabriela’s looming decision to stay or go. In this land of grand passions, owing debts to Shakespeare, Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” and many other sources, Rivera jams comic tangos up against pistol-whippings up against attempts to stoke our Gulf War outrage.

Efremova’s languorous feline and Mack’s heightened, hopped-up coyote are charming and graceful and earthy. Ortiz, by contrast, lends the yearning Gabriela a flat, no-problem affect, finally monotonous. Montano, a charismatic presence, lays too hard into the sergeant’s machismo. That’s all we get from a character written with a bit of an authorial sneer to begin with.

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* “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 and 7:45 p.m. Ends Feb. 27. $26-$45. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 2 hours.

Svetlana Efremova: Cat

Victor Mack: Coyote

Ana Ortiz: Gabriela

Wells Rosales: Martin

Robert Montano: Benito

Written by Jose Rivera. Juliette Carrillo. Set by Monica Raya. Costumes by Meg Neville. Lighting by Geoff Korf. Composer-sound designer Mitch Greenhill. Stage manager Randall K. Lum.