STAGE REVIEW : Calfest Puts ‘Geography’ on the Map

South Coast Repertory had a big weekend. The industrious playgoer could see new plays by Marlane Meyer, Beth Henley and Robert Daseler, and attend readings of new scripts by Sam Garcia Jr. and Philip Kan Gotanda, all part of SCR’s California Play Festival--Calfest.

With time for only one show, I chose Meyer’s “The Geography of Luck.” This started as a reading at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and will return there for a mainstage production in August. It’s a work in transition, although you wouldn’t know it from Roberta Levitow’s assured SCR production, featuring Ebbe Roe Smith as an ex-con trying to connect with his life and Elizabeth Ruscio as a woman who is ready to help him, up to a point.

This is Meyer’s third play (after “Etta Jenks” and “Kingfish”) and we begin to see where her concerns lie. She’s not endorsing “attitude” for attitude’s sake--although her characters are masters of it. She knows that they are hurting, and she suggests that the hurt runs through the culture.

She’s particularly concerned with men, because they run things. She presents them as landlocked creatures with a primitive response system, rising only to power games and sex. What a pity, she says, that they can’t respond to the woman in themselves. What a tragedy that real women have to descend to their archetypes to find a place in the world.

We could sense Meyer’s concerns in “Etta Jenks” and “Kingfish,” but they are literally spelled out in “The Geography of Luck,” not to the improvement of the play. The setting is Las Vegas, a world of strippers and used-car sharpsters. Levitow’s SCR cast makes us believe in their sleaze, and we neither expect nor want them to talk like normal people--brigands deserve a language of their own.

It can even be a little high-flown. Thieves do believe that they know it all. But when Meyer’s characters start to talk about “demystifying the landscape,” one wonders why such informed sensibilities are still drinking Ripple with their fish sticks. Without losing its fantasy, the language of the play needs to be taken down a peg.

There is a play here. The story suggests “Tender Mercies”--an ex-country singer (Smith) gets redeemed by a good woman (Ruscio). Here, though, the hero is just out of the pen for having killed his wife. He’s also haunted by the goddess-like image of his mother, a former showgirl (Joan Stuart-Morris). Not until she becomes just an image, will he be free.

His liberation isn’t spelled out, simply played, and it registers. Less explanation might also deepen the scene where Smith forces his mean-mouthed father (Al Ruscio) to accept his love--a fight scene, paradoxically. There’s sound mythic stuff bubbling under “The Geography of Luck,” if Meyer would just remove the footnotes.

Smith and Elizabeth Ruscio are very strong at the center of the play. Neither asks for sympathy from the audience, and each gets it. Fine, cold supporting performances come from John Nesci, Scott Burkholder, Ismael (East) Carlo, Dendrie Taylor and the aforementioned Stuart-Morris, doubling as a customer who takes Smith for a ride.

Cliff Faulkner’s setting isn’t lavish--not with all those other plays on the budget--but Susan Denison Geller’s costumes are properly hostile and Tom Ruzika’s lights convey the hellishness of a town that never sleeps. Orpheus in Vegas: it fits.

Plays Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8:30 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 3 p.m. Closes June 4. Tickets $20-$25. 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (714) 957-4033.