The quiet depths of despair

Has Tracy Letts, the author of such floridly violent plays as “Killer Joe” and “Bug,” gone soft?

His latest work, “Man From Nebraska,” which opened Friday at South Coast Repertory in a production directed by Oscar winner William Friedkin, is totally devoid of bloodshed. What’s more, there isn’t a single sexual attack with a Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick or an unanesthetized tooth extraction to make us squirm in our seats.

True, there is one fatality that occurs from natural causes, more or less. And Friedkin, whose genius in such films as “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist” was to reveal the ordinary plausibility of extraordinary horror, lends the funeral a creepy mortician’s reality.

But the action isn’t pummeling in the usual Letts fashion. The titular protagonist of this thematically rich yet ultimately underwritten drama is an insurance executive from Lincoln, Neb., a churchgoing family man whose most unsettling dimension is the extreme reticence that marks his interpersonal relationships.

Ken (Brian Kerwin) conducts himself as though he were always sitting in a pew. When driving with his wife, Nancy (the estimable Kathy Baker), he sinks so deeply into a murky silence that he can acknowledge a comment only with a distracted grunt. And when the two dine out at a local restaurant, they become one of those disturbing portraits of long-married silence that strangers can’t help shuddering over.

Beware those quiet depths. “Man From Nebraska” may have little appetite for sensationalized gore, but its subject is terrifying all the same. Ostensibly dealing with Ken’s sudden crisis of faith (distraught, he confesses in the middle of the night to Nancy that he no longer believes in God), the play is really about the abysses of nonmeaning that all of us conceal within -- and the ways we sidestep or cover over the existential uncertainty that is our collective lot.

Letts, a Steppenwolf Theatre Company actor whose play was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004, has become one of the most compelling dramatists working today. Although the tolerance-testing carnage of his earlier work has proved disaffecting to some, the wanton brutality on display was always part of a larger poetic vision. Both “Killer Joe” and “Bug” were as much concerned with the magnetic pull of disaster on his characters as the larger cultural emptiness compounding their worse instincts.

The blasted American backdrop is clearly in view in “Man From Nebraska.” Game shows (a nice Friedkin touch) blare from TV sets that aren’t so much watched as unconditionally accepted. Their domineering influence parallels that of religion in Ken’s evangelical community, which also demands unthinking compliance. Here, grace before a meal is as rote as a reverend’s house call in an hour of need.

What proves less dramatically satisfying is the baldness of the situation, summed up in one of Ken’s panicked disclosures: “The stars. In the sky. Don’t make sense. To me. I don’t understand them.” It’s at moments like these that the work seems little more than an outline that the playwright must fill in.

Stylistically, Letts has moved into new territory. Although “Killer Joe” and “Bug” dwelled in long, realistic takes that encouraged actors simply to behave rather than act, “Man From Nebraska” proceeds in the short, staccato scenes favored by such contemporary British playwrights as Caryl Churchill, whose “Ice Cream” (although far more elliptical) kept oddly springing to mind.

Perhaps it is the shared penchant for car scenes (and the notion of travel as a metaphor for the unpredictability of existence itself) that evoked the comparison. Or maybe it was the way both dramas split their time between America and England, which is where Ken escapes to by himself after telling his wife about his heretical doubts. (England, tellingly enough, is as far away as Ken will go.)

Some of the play’s funniest moments occur between Ken and Tamyra (Susan Dalian), the bartender at his London hotel, who befriends him despite her impatience with his prodigious, not to say privileged, American naivete. “If you’ve come to England looking for God, you’re going to be disappointed,” she chidingly tells him early on. “He hasn’t been seen round here since the Crusades.”

But episodic to a fault, the plot keeps spinning out characters who disappear before they can do more than point out the hypocrisy of whatever it is they stand for.

Ken briefly hooks up with Pat (Laura Niemi), an American woman who claims to have grown “philosophical” about her divorce yet can’t resist making randy assaults on married men. He also finds temporary solace in the aggressive company of Tamyra’s flatmate, Harry (Julian Stone), who introduces Ken to drugs, discos and the art of sculpture -- and none very credibly, it should be noted.

Meanwhile, back in Nebraska, Nancy suffers consoling visits from her morally inflamed adult daughter Ashley (Susannah Schulman, in dead-on high dudgeon) as well as from the Rev. Todd (Ben Livingson) and his codger father (Hal Landon Jr.), who’d like to find nonsectarian ways of comforting her in her abandoned hour.

And then there’s Ken’s senile mother (Jane A. Johnston), whose condition has exhausted Nancy’s sympathy and eventually challenges her Christian devotion.

Friedkin directs each scene in a square of darkness, as though the drama were a series of etchings in black and white -- an effect that Christopher Barreca’s set and Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz’s lighting accomplish with precision.

The production’s tempo, however, seems off. It’s no surprise that the supporting players have difficulty establishing solid presences in the rapid dramatic sweep, but so too do the leads. Kerwin, who has the most challenging role, doesn’t always manage to earn the emotion he’s required to suddenly flood us with on demand. And Baker seems as though she wants to give more than she’s allowed.

The cast hasn’t come to completely trust the stillness that’s as much a part of this drama as the characters’ cavernous silences. (Interpretive nudging mars the quieter moments.) Or maybe the desolation that lies at the heart of the play has been a bit too airbrushed. The resolution, in particular, seems kinder and gentler than the tale ultimately calls for. And Friedkin lends it a big sentimental flourish, even as he tries to preserve some of the ambivalence.

In truth, the fault is shared by both production and play. As it stands now, “Man From Nebraska” seems as uncomplicatedly straightforward as its vanilla title.

*

‘Man From Nebraska’

Where: South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 7:45 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 7:45 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: April 2

Price: $20 to $58

Contact: (714) 708-5555

Running time: 2 hour, 15 minutes