Mixed Fandango by Different Strokes!

One of the missions of Different Strokes! Performance Arts Collective is to nurture local playwrights, and the new play Mixed Fandango, by Travis Lowe, is a product of that program. The poster tagline for the show, which opened November 7, is “Love is love is love,” and the content of the comedy bears that out in a dramatically creative way.

The show, directed by Different Strokes!’s Managing Artistic Director Stephanie Hickling Beckman, blends the stories of three couples on one Thanksgiving, using only a simple loveseat on a bare stage that alternately become a kitchen counter, an Uber Smart car, a gay couple’s bed (or maybe a sofa), and other locations. The show begins with Madison (Emmalie Handley) and Dylan (Jason Williams), a young couple expecting her family for their first holiday visit, then switches to two parallel stories: Roger (Aaron Ybarra), a dignified widower, has hired his favorite Uber driver, Emily (Molly Graves), to go to a crab shack for Thanksgiving dinner, and longtime couple Ray (David Mycoff) and Luis (Phillipe Andre Coquet) are contemplating where to get some pie.

These introductory scenes are naturalistic and nicely realized by playwright, director, and cast. The audience quickly gets to know the dynamics of each relationship and the personalities of those involved. The dialogue is easy and clever and will be familiar to anyone who’s been through any of these three stages of love: first steps (Roger and Emily), the evolving negotiations of a partnership in its first years (Madison and Dylan), and the comfort and exhaustion of longtime commitment (Ray and Luis). A monologue about the universality of love beautifully delivered by Coquet establishes the show’s themes with a poignant eloquence.

Then the "mixed” spin on this triple fandango kicks in. This storytelling twist may be best experienced in complete naiveté, so we’ll now pause while those of you who are intrigued and want nothing more spoiled depart this page to go and make reservations for an upcoming performance. Those who want to know more before committing, even at the risk of “spoilers,” may now continue to the next paragraph, below the photo.

Emmalie Handley and Jason Williams in a promotional image created for Mixed Fandango.

Well into the first act, the pairings of the couples onstage — always two people at a time — begin to magically mix and match. Ray will still be talking with Luis, for example, but the person beside him on the couch will be, say, Dylan — who’s carrying on a conversation with the unseen Madison in their kitchen. The conceit allows Lowe to play with the parallels between the couples (“love is love is love”) and also creates some very funny moments, since we’re listening to two dialogues at once, hearing only half of each, and enjoying the way the mismatched conversations blend and clash.

The play takes its couples through some parallel but not precisely identical experiences, most prominently a car ride and a traffic stop, that allows the discordant discussions to make some kind of sense, but it still relies on an attentive audience to fill in what’s not being heard from the missing partners in each scene. It all culminates in the wonderful titular fandango, about which we will say no more even in this “spoiler” section.

Maintaining this fractured conceit for a good portion of the running time is no small accomplishment for both Lowe and Hickling Beckman — as well as the cast, who are playing scene after scene with both visible and invisible partners. There are no fumbles, although the “mixed” portion of the play goes on so long that it may wear out even an enthusiastic audience. After the fandango scene, the show needs to come to a more rapid conclusion than it does, since the heightened energy of that moment makes the less dynamic scenes that follow seem to drag a bit.

The cast, however, never wavers, all of them giving credibly modulated performances that keep the show anchored in a kind of realism even within its surreal structure. Thanks to Lowe’s fine-tuned ear for how couples really talk to one another, the actors create likable, modestly flawed characters without melodrama. They range from Handley’s amusingly excitable Madison to Ybarra’s seductively withholding Roger, with the middle ground held by the remainder: Williams’ smile-inducing, devil-may-care Dylan, Graves’ appealing but distrustful Molly, Mycoff’s familiarly self-absorbed Ray, and Coquet’s charismatic and expressive Luis.

The final scene pulls it all together and resolves the surrealism for a pleasing finish. Whether the play covers a lot of dramatic ground is up for debate — other than the courtship between Roger and Emily, the couples don’t have major issues to resolve and wind up not far from where they started. But the ride is entertaining in any case, and the debut of a new work from a talented local playwright with a creative vision all his own is genuinely exciting.

Mixed Fandango runs through November 23. DIfferent Strokes! Performing Arts Collective is housed in the Tina McGuire Theatre within Asheville’s Wortham Center for the Performing Arts. Visit differentstrokespac.org for tickets and details.

Aaron Ybarra and Molly Graves in a promotional image created for Mixed Fandango.