Review: ‘Popcorn Falls’ offers rare chance for puzzles, laughter and entertainment

The audience enters the theater to be confronted by a simple thrust stage with a blackboard at its center, two doors at the sides, two chairs, one table and a malfunctioning microphone. There are only two actors. Yet there are a dizzying array of characters played inventively over the 90 minutes the play runs by those same two actors.

Occasionally, one character is played alternately by the two actors. The set is the creation of Samantha Reno, the scenic designer for the theater company for eight years and 110 productions, who is now moving on to Cincinnati. Thus “Popcorn Falls,” written by James Hindman and one year after its Broadway premiere, inaugurates the third season at the Sofia, the B. Street Theatre.

Because the entertainment has us run a gamut of plot turns and character transformations, simple things keep changing, as when Joe, the town custodian, sees his feather duster become the aging librarian’s cute white cat, complete with sound effects uttered by the character. The mayor, Mr. Trundle, a failed transplant from a nearby larger town, plays the straight man, for the most part, to this near-phantasmagoria of citizens and human types. At 57 years old, the mayor improbably falls hopelessly in love with Becky, the 20-something barmaid at the Sudsy Mug. She has been transformed from Joe with a deft draping of a garment around her waist, as an apron. It functions equally well, and iconically, when the actor playing the mayor briefly becomes this character.

There is, of course, a plot. The play takes place in Popcorn Falls, a small town suffering from all kinds of civic decay with perhaps the exceptions of opioid addiction and school shootings — after all, this is lively comic entertainment. Popcorn Falls is beset by loss of population and the drying up of its namesake, compounded by the corrupt county executive’s desire to replace all in the town with a sewage plant. And it’s on the verge of bankruptcy.

This dilemma, through a variety of twists and turns, can only be resolved or forestalled by Popcorn Falls creating its own theater and producing a play within a week — the mayor and Joe set out to accomplish this. If that seems a bit absurd, things soon become even absurder. And the audience is often challenged to keep track of scene location, character designation and plot twist. Here we have a standby of so much postmodern drama — not to mention even Shakespeare’s Hamlet — the play within a play, which continually requires rewriting and reconception, since its author, Mayor Trundle, has no idea how to write a play.

In a recent interview, James Hindman, the “Popcorn Falls” playwright, says he was inspired by a small town in Michigan, that was “all boarded up, about to go bankrupt” until two people moved in who wanted to open a theater. And did, so that two years later the town was thriving with two theaters, and a popcorn store. So Hindman feels, not surprisingly, “Art can save the world.”

The two actors, Greg Alexander and Dave Pierini, adeptly, portray the mayor, Joe, a barmaid, the barmaid’s daughter, a lascivious and aging sixth-grade teacher, a one-armed lumberyard owner — totaling 20-something in all. Each sports a backstory, and eventual involvement — romantic or otherwise — with one or more of the other characters. There is also the mortician, singled out by his Nazi-sounding German accent and always carrying a spyglass. He offers double duty in the play within a play, as they put him in charge of . . . makeup.

Hardly anything escapes the opportunity for dramatic invention or transformation. A mophead of straggly curls sex changes one of the male characters into the Popcorn Falls’ local deadhead returnee. She can barely utter two words or answer a simple question without being transfixed by linguistic shortfall or short-circuited brain electronics. But she rises to comic transfiguration when a key vehicle transporting the “cast” of the play breaks down with a flat tire. She volunteers, “Of course I can fix a flat.”

At the center of the originally static stage is a blackboard, with two convenient sides, which cues the bewildered audience in with scene locations such as “Sudsy Mug,” or “Tryouts.” Scenes and erasures keep multiplying, and attention to these changing directions on the blackboard leads to periodic comedy.

In a ballgame, it’s said you can’t tell the players without their numbers and a program. For this play’s program, the players are identified simply as “Actor 1” and “Actor 2,” and part of the challenge and joy of the entertainment is keeping track of who is who, what’s what, and what a player’s role or designation is. Here’s a 90-minute evening’s entertainment that you can laugh at, be puzzled by and go home satisfied.

If you go

“Popcorn Falls”

Written by James Hindman and directed by Lyndsay Burch

Where: The Sofia, 2700 Capitol Avenue

When: Running through Feb. 23

Showings: Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m., Thursdays at 8 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 9 p.m., with matinees at 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays, and Saturdays at 5 p.m.

Cost: $28 to $47

Info and tickets: (916) 443-5300 or at https://bstreettheatre.org/shows/

This story was originally published January 21, 2020 at 3:07 PM.