By Marty Hughley
The Oregonian
September 28, 2009

Becky Foster is office manager at an auto dealership, but she's not just going to sell you a new car, she's going to take you for a ride.  She's not malicious, mind you, just kind of harried by her busy life as working wife and mother. When a tiny miscommunication opens a road to wealth and ease, she races into the realm of romantic farce mapped by this delightful Steven Dietz comedy at Artists Repertory Theatre.

In one sense, the folks being taken for a ride are Joe, Becky's doting blue-collar husband, and Walter, her rich widower suitor, both of whom are deceived, however gently. But more so it's the audience, which Becky not only acknowledges throughout the play, but pulls into the action. In effect, you're not just watching her whiz down life's highway, you're riding shotgun.

Which is fine, because an omission here and a white lie there only make her more sympathetic.

From the moment Marilyn Stacey takes the stage as Becky, hurriedly tidying up a mess of a living room, her nervous, chatty amiability wins us over. As she rushes back and forth across a roadway that curves through the middle of Lawrence Larsen's cleverly efficient scenic design, toggling frenetically between that living room and long days at the dealership, we can tell she could use a break that her current treadmill doesn't offer.

It's not as if she's looking for an escape.  But when Walter wanders into the dealership late one evening, an offhand use of the past tense in regard to Joe ("My husband always wanted one of these," she says of a luxury model) is all it takes for the dotty old guy to take her for a widow. Smitten and enthusiastic, he talks right over her attempts to clarify. And not that we in the audience have anything against Joe - who, as played by Todd Van Voris, is as doughy and sweet as a Krispy Kreme - but we're just as eager for a glimpse of the good life as Becky is.

There's great, warmly engaging humor here, as we proceed to follow this female version of mid-life crisis, and as the plot's complications start to speed and swerve.  But what really makes the play work is the poignant treatment of loss in the lives of some of the surrounding characters. It's not a dark comedy, but its bright light tone is streaked with contrasting shadows (an aspect deftly played up in Jeff Forbes' lighting design.)

That tension is played most fruitfully in a first-act scene featuring Michael Mendelson as Becky's co-worker Steve, who's obsessively grieving his wife's death in a hiking accident. Steve's description of taking out his distress on a little kid who tries to comfort him is so over the top that it can't help but be hilarious. Yet Mendelson delivers such a wrenching sense of Steve's pain that the scene becomes much more than a gag.

The acting is deft throughout, but most notably in the way Stacey conveys Becky's growing confusion as she vacillates between mundane reality and improbably present fantasy; in David Bodin's kindliness and mild befuddlement as Walter, and in Rollie Walsh's turn as Becky's psychology student son, who's part poster-boy for prolonged adolescence, party theory-spouting academic wannabe. Directed by Allen Nause, the show feels as sure-footed as it does charmingly off-handed.

Dietz's thematic conflation of cars and romance surely is nothing new. But he uses them both nimbly as metaphors for opportunity and markers of status and fulfillment. And perhaps what we find riding along with Becky is that she's just taking a quick detour to find herself right where she belongs.