There are no surprises in Tony Pasqualini’s time-travel romance Lost in Time, opening in its world premiere at MadLab this weekend in a production directed by Tay Lane.
Lost in Time opens with Danny’s (Chanse McDuffie) roommate Robert (Mark Dubovec) picking him up on the floor of their Boston college apartment. But Danny fell asleep almost 40 years later in San Francisco. That sleep came with a heavy head after a lifetime of mistakes and selfishness. With this second chance, Danny sets out to preemptively make things right with his wife Gwen (Anna Leeper) and her sister Amy (Jessica Gibson), two years before he met Gwen in the original timeline.
As anyone who’s seen anything involving time travel – from Peggy Sue Got Married to Back to the Future to Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” – knows, this doesn’t end well. The check-box quality of hitting every cliché for this story makes Lost in Time exhausting despite committed performances and direction that moves things along at a decent clip.
Very early in Lost in Time’s running time, the play throws sloppy anachronisms in the audience’s face. Egregiously for me in the first few minutes, Robert sings part of “New York, New York.” That song debuted in a Scorsese movie released three years after the play’s 1974-set time. And that kind of minor miss wouldn’t have been as bad if the play didn’t ham-fistedly establish we’re in 1974 several times – Anna does the “Did you see [Nixon’s] resignation speech last night?” elbow in the ribs. There are too many of those first-year-writing-school moves where characters explain to each other what they already know at length. Coupled with failures of research that don’t impact the story, this makes the second act of this hour-and-forty-five minute play with one intermission feel twice as long as it is.
What’s strong in Lost in Time is the acting. The cast and the chemistry between them makes most of the first act fun and pleasant. They’re characters I’ve seen before but I settled in happy to spend time with them. McDuffie does an interesting job playing Danny as a repentant narcissist but one without the tools to truly change the behavior. McDuffie makes clear Danny’s wide-eyed shock never left the man, it was just less cute at 60.
Leeper’s Gwen is a delight – it helps that she has the only character whose motivations seem rooted in reality, but she dances through that variety of tones with aplomb. Gibson’s Amy is a riotous ball of fire, an excellent showcase for her comic timing and whiplash turns to break your heart. Dubovec’s Robert gives charming nuance to what could be just another doofus roommate and finds himself the emotional center of the play.
Lost in Time runs through August 25 with shows at 8:00 pm Friday and Saturday. For tickets and more info, visit madlab.net.