Jens Rasmussen is quite striking

Jens Rasmussen & Georgia Cohen

It's not often that a playwright sets out to mystify an audience as resolutely as Alexandra Collier does in Underland. The setting is "a small, dusty town in the middle of Australia," and believe me, this Underland is no wonderland. Drought conditions prevail. There are warnings about crocodiles, reportedly moving ever closer to town in search of water. People have a way of turning up dead or disappearing altogether. And what about the man who staggers on stage at the opening, looking disturbed and pulling a bloody tooth from his mouth?

Following this ugly display, the play switches gears, focusing for a while on Ruth and Violet, a pair of adolescent girls who dabble in smoking pot and gossiping maliciously about everyone they know. Violet is the prettier, more dominant one, to whom Ruth anxiously kowtows, but they make a perfectly matched pair of hellions, amusing themselves by sitting in the back of art class and making annoying meowing sounds while their new teacher tries to introduce herself.

The teacher, Miss Harmony (Collier favors names right out of Restoration comedy), is new to town; in one of the play's sharpest, funniest passages, her easygoing, let's-be-friends manner is contrasted with the scalding, hard-ass approach of the gym and math teacher, Mr. B. ("You're like flaccid wombats, the lot of you," he says, offering his own special brand of motivation.) It's not long before a little B-Harmony romance is in the air; at the risk of giving away too much, let's just say that she discovers that passion has its price.

Then there's Taka, a Japanese salaryman sitting in his Tokyo office, listening to exercise audios and playing with his tamagotchi, a tiny little digital pet that, in this case, meows like a kitten. He finds a hole in his floor and, getting inside, begins crawling along it until he exits -- in the Australian town inhabited by Ruth, Violet, et al.

As Ruth and Violet, Kiley Lotz and Angeliea Stark offer hair-raisingly accurate portraits of the kind of sullen, rebellious adolescent who makes one think fondly about reviving corporal punishment, but each of them gradually reveals layers of uncertainty that make them more than just caricatures. Jens Rasmussen is quite striking as the furious, tough-talking Mr. B., who harbors a powerful, all-consuming passion for Miss Harmony, and is also in possession of a terrible secret.

-Read the whole review by David Barbour at Lighting & Sound America