Theatre in Review: Maple and Vine (Playwrights Horizons) In a vintage year for plays with flagrantly unbelievable premises-- just off the top of my head, The Submission, Burning, The Atmosphere of Memory, and Wild Animals You Should Know immediately leap to mind -- none is nuttier than the jumping-off point of Maple and Vine. Working the kind of gimmicky idea that would have been catnip to Rod Serling, Jordan Harrison sets out to spoof the mores of buttoned-up '50s-era suburbia versus the vague, free-floating discontent felt by young urban professionals of today. And, even when it bogs down in the details, it still offers a fair amount of fun. But, oh, those details.... The play opens in a manner eerily similar to Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue, with a married couple sitting in bed, any possibility of sleep ruined by the noise-making neighbors. Harrison establishes very quickly that Katha, his heroine, is a basket case in the making -- bored with her job at Random House, depressed by a miscarriage, and sickened by the modern era, with its tsunamis of information and superabundance of consumer choices. Standing by her, staunchly but anxiously, is husband, Ryu, who himself is vaguely dissatisfied with his career as a plastic surgeon, his days spent suctioning vast amounts of adipose tissue out of wealthy matrons. The solution to their problems arrives in the unlikely form of Dean, who crosses paths with Katha in the park on the afternoon that she impulsively quits her job. Dressed like an extra on Mad Men, complete with snap-brim fedora, Dean positively radiates self-satisfaction. The surprisingly guileless Katha pumps him for his secret and learns that he is a representative of the SDO --the Society of Dynamic Obsolescence -- a compound, located somewhere in the Midwest, where everyone has agreed to live in a painstakingly recreated version of 1955. In a New York minute, Katha and Ryu have signed on to a six-month trial at the SDO, living in a suburban tract house complete with a hi-fi and cocktail cart. She wears New Look dresses and makes casseroles. He toils at the local factory, making boxes. If that seems like a bit of a step down from medicine, this is a good place to mention that the SDO is no mere exercise in nostalgia. Its participants are devoted to recreating everything about the '50s, including its conflicts and prejudices. (There's even an Authenticity Committee, consisting mostly of desperate housewives, who police every detail of the community's existence.) In this context, Ryu, who is of Japanese descent, has to start at the bottom. Then again, as Ellen, Dean's faintly terrifying wife, tells Ryu after a couple of Dubonnets, "To think, just a few years ago we were putting you people behind fences, and now you're working right there alongside us. Isn't it grand. America." Whenever Jeanine Serralles, who plays Ellen, is around, Maple and Vine is good wicked fun. Ellen, the kind of iron butterfly who once ran women's clubs everywhere, presides over the Authenticity Committee with the cheerfulness of a kindergarten teacher and the judgment of Madame Defarge. When Ryu innocently produces a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, she smilingly informs him that it's Smirnoff or nothing. Making a housewarming visit, she waits until Katha steps into the kitchen, then, her manner changing with head-snapping speed, she conducts a gimlet-eyed survey of her hostess' décor. She even lobbies to get the birth control pill banned -- after all, it wasn't invented until 1960 -- urging the ladies of the community to go out and have babies. There are the makings of a good sketch here, and, for a little while, it's amusing to watch Katha and Ryu jump through hoops, trying to fit in; it's even more fun to watch Ellen happily find fault with everything they do. But a little bit of this goes a long way, and because Harrison hasn't made a plausible psychological case for why Katha and Ryu would want to live in the era of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Maple and Vine becomes tiresome. The SDO experience begins to seem like nothing more than an elaborate exercise in self-punishment; Katha even drops by the Authenticity Committee, urging the ladies to treat her and Ryu with more prejudice, because they're in an interracial marriage. Harrison tries to up the ante by embroiling three of the characters in a Far From Heaven-style bisexual triangle, but the more Maple and Vine embraced straight-faced drama, the more my mind wandered, dwelling on the impossibility of the entire enterprise. The director, Anne Kauffman, does her best to make sense of this hodgepodge of fantasy, satire, and melodrama, but it's a tough battle. Marin Ireland deploys every one of her ditsy, Annie Hall mannerisms, working overtime to convince us that Katha is an adorable screwball with an honest-to-god broken heart, but I never for a second believed that she secretly yearned to be an Eisenhower-era housefrau. Peter Kim brings his considerable charm to bear on the role of Ryu, but the character is an almost complete blank, mostly passively going along with Katha's whims. Much better is Trent Dawson as Dean, a Life Magazine ad come to life, his voice oozing with the authority of a TV pitchman touting a new brand of instant coffee. Pedro Pascal also pulls off a neat double act as Katha's Eve Harrington-ish assistant and as a factory foreman who'd like to usher in the Stonewall era a few years early. Serralles is in a class by herself, passing through the SDO with a supreme air of condescension, like one of the Windsors on a tour of the Third World. She also just about pulls off the play's longest and most involved aria, in which she explains how she and Dean got involved in this bizarre form of historical reenactment in the first place. It's none too convincing, but Serralles convinces you that there's real pain in it. She also makes a couple of priceless appearances as an airhead secretary in Katha's office. Maple and Vine isn't particularly helped by Alexander Dodge's enormously complicated setting, which requires an elevator and several wagons, all of which have to be moved around endlessly between the generally short scenes. Some of his décor feels problematic, too. The wallpaper in Katha and Ellen's homes looks pretty avant-garde, even kind of early '60s. (In truth, these characters would probably do their living rooms up in the Ethan Allen style.) On the other hand, Ilona Somogyi has a lot of fun contrasting casual 21st -century outfits with the accessories and foundation garments of 60 years ago. David Weiner's lighting and Bray Poor's sound design are both thoroughly professional. In the end, however, Maple and Vine founders on a none-too-solid foundation. Harrison doesn't sentimentalize the '50s, but neither can he explain the allure the era holds for some people or its place in popular culture. Only a very young person could imagine that anyone would want to return to it.--David Barbour 
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