Review: Chalk Circle Collective’s ‘The Strangers’ is bold and eye-popping

Early in Christopher Oscar Peña’s play “The Strangers,” the actors confess to the audience that Peña “appropriated” elements of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 drama “Our Town” for his play.

The main character in “The Strangers” is Cris, an actor cast in the lead role of an “Our Town” production, and another character, Emily, was named after the most tragic character in Wilder’s play. There are also actors directly addressing the audience, the foretelling of characters’ fates, the iconic step ladder at center stage, chairs lined up tombstone-style (to seat the living and the dead) and a climactic wedding. All of these moments recall Wilder’s groundbreaking play about life, death and the passage of time in small-town, early-20th-century America.

But “The Strangers,” which San Diego’s Chalk Circle Collective opened Sunday in its West Coast premiere at the Old Town Theatre, is most definitely not “Our Town.”

A queer American-born son of Honduran immigrants, Peña said after the opening-night performance that “Our Town” didn’t look like the community he grew up in, so he wrote his own contemporary twist on the story.

Where “Our Town” is placid, gently-paced and G-rated, “The Strangers” is peppered with fast action, arguments, sex and violence.

The characters in Peña’s play are not truly strangers. They’re siblings, friends, lovers, roommates, teammates and acquanitances. But at heart, they are estranged in how they hide their true selves from one another, resist intimacy, and manipulate and betray one other.

Coleman Ray Clark makes an audacious San Diego directing debut with “The Strangers,” creating a shape-shifting theaterscape that’s at times haunting, funny, disturbing, visually dazzling and filled with surprises.

Steven Lone is the cast standout as Cris, a deeply lonely actor who arrives in town for an “Our Town” production. Lone’s Cris visibly aches with sadness, lack of confidence and low self-esteem. Even when Cris finds romance with theater worker Dave — ebulliently played with sweet, boyish sincerity by Jake Bradford — he pushes love away.

Eight other actors co-star in the production, mostly in multiple roles, including Michael Amira Temple (most memorable as a heroic crossing guard), Lauren King Thompson (best as a wise homeless woman), Kimberly Weinberger (the dark and complex Emily and others), Javier David (fiery in dual roles), Kelsey Venter (best as the truth-telling wedding planner) and Michael DiRoma (as the gentle and idealistic anti-ICE activist Niegel), as well as young actors Pepe Aparicio and Ellis Quesada in smaller roles.

The show’s eye-popping physical production is impressive, with gorgeous lighting design by Sammy Webster; whooshing, bone-shaking sound by Steven Leffue; costumes by Jemima Dutra; and scenic design by Nicholas Pontung, who has created an overcrowded, props-filled stage that the actors pull elements from to set up their scenes.

The structure of the play in the first act sometimes feels disjointed, with no clear throughline connecting all the scenes. In that way it reminds me of “Our Town,” where the stage manager chooses which scenes the audience will see. But the gap in exposition for the most shocking relationship in “The Strangers” left me wanting more.

The more focused second act picks up some years later on the eve of Cris and Dave’s wedding. The act’s highlight is Lone’s masterful delivery of Cris’s monologue about his self-identity, self-destruction, anxiety and fears for the future in a world torn by cruelty, racial strife, politics and environmental catastrophe. Bradford also delivers a wonderful monlogue as the misunderstood Dave in Act Two.

The play’s unexpected conclusion once again draws on the timeless nature of “Our Town,” while also recognizing the damage that humans can do to each other and the world around them. Although this line from “Our Town” isn’t in “The Strangers,” it’s an apt epilogue for Peña’s play: “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”

‘The Strangers’

When: 7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Through Nov. 30

Where: Old Town’s Historic Barn Theatre, 4040 Twiggs St., San Diego

Tickets: $40 and up

Email: Chalkcirclecollective@gmail.com

Online: chalkcirclecollective.com