‘Middletown’ strands us in that abstract middle ground

There’s nothing the least bit conventional about Will Eno’s plays, which often float between Samuel Beckett’s Absurdism and some of the more inscrutable stage works of the last couple of decades.

And that brings us to “Middletown,” now in its Southern California premiere at Chance Theater. Despite the heroic efforts of director Trevor Biship and his cast, Eno’s 2010 opus is almost willfully enigmatic – some might even say frustratingly so.

Mary Swanson (Lola Kelly) and her husband have just moved to Middletown and, as she relates, they and hope to start a family – but as we soon realize, he’s a spouse in absentia, his career keeping him perpetually away from home.

The opening scenes depict Middletown residents going about their daily business, their chitchat filled with typical Eno wordplay. The only person to offer Mary friendship is John Dodge (James McHale), a skilled handyman who loves the library and its books.

As the friendship deepens, Mary strikes us as fairly normal, albeit uncertain – but John appears is and loopy, with a habit of contradicting his own pronouncements. He’s also sad, lonely and desperate.

As the Librarian (Karen Webster) says, “Some people say the secret to life is being able to live in the middle of all our different ideas about life.” Fair enough – but it’s hard to locate that “middle” when the extremes are so bizarre and stretch out so far in every direction. Her observation that “we’re born with questions, and the world is the answer” is more profound, even if it provides few answers to us.

Cartoonist Gary Larson used his long-running single panel comic “The Far Side” to poke fun at people and animals dealing with biology, astronomy, medicine, archaeology, physics, philosophy and psychology. In “Middletown,” Eno seems to share those preoccupations, but with less of a definite set-up/payoff structure than Larson’s work.

A “Middletown” example is the scene of an astronaut named Greg (Ahmed T. Brooks) orbiting Earth, which hints that space travel has become bogged down in cold science and mathematical formulas instead of what it should be about: the cosmic questions space exploration raises, something huge we’ve all lost sight of.

Some issues voiced in “Middletown” have been debated for centuries: What does it feel like to be born? What happens when we die? What do you want out of life? Is a life without love or any meaningful human connection or interaction worth living?

Other points Eno raises have only been asked more recently, suggesting the view that American society has grown so disconnected and fragmented as to drain our lives of everything of real value, leaving only what Mary refers to as sleepless nights and “needless worry.”

Much of “Middletown” has more of the flavor and style of a “Saturday Night Live” opening monologue or sketch than scenes from a play. If this is an “Our Town” for our times, it’s with a nebulous and decidedly dark 21st-century spin.

Functioning much like the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s play is the Cop (Robert Foran), who wanders from scene to scene, sharing his thoughts with us, acting as our window into the day-to-day life in the town.

Yet, as comforting and gentle as is “Our Town,” “Middletown” is quasi-surreal and baffling. Through an ending that includes a simultaneous birth and death, one point does emerge: Life doesn’t always make sense, and its unpredictability is fueled equally by happiness and grief.

Kelly is charmingly ingenuous as Mary. Too considerate to impose on others, she finds John as a kindred lost soul. By contrast, McHale’s troubled John is prone to panic attacks and crippling phobias. By the time he states “All life long, John Dodge in the wrong,” we realize he’s seriously ill and headed off a cliff since no one in Middletown is there to catch him.

The others in Biship’s cast – Foran, Ahmed T. Brooks, Ned Liebl, Karen Webster, Karen O’Hanlon and Marissa LeDoux – are also on target, and Bruce Goodrich’s intricately detailed set and Karyn D. Lawrence’s lighting are considerable assets.

“Middletown” depicts the prosaic existence we all occupy – everything that’s in “the middle” between the two extremes of human existence, birth and death. And like life itself, it offers no easy answers – just a lot of digging and sifting in the search for something meaningful.

‘Middletown’

When: Through May 21. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays

Where: Fyda-Mar Stage, Chance Theater at Bette Aitken Theater Arts Center, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills

Tickets: $21-$35

Length: 2 hours, 20 minutes

Suitability: Adults and teens (for content)

Information: 888-455-4212, chancetheater.com