Review: Racecar Racecar Racecar, a Surreal Cross-Country Road Trip With Dad

The cross-country road trip is the American Odyssey, a character-building journey for everyone from Jack Kerouac to Britney Spears. The latest addition to the genre is Kallan Dana’s Racecar Racecar Racecar, a surreal one-act that packs a lot of generational trauma and cryptic meaning into one hour. It is now making its world premiere with the Hearth at A.R.T./New York Theatres. It’s like a slyly subversive billboard on an abandoned highway. Blink and you’ll miss it.

It starts in New York, where a daughter (Julia Greer) has decided to join her dad (Bruce McKenzie) for a road trip to California so he can clean out his storage unit ahead of Christmas. Their banter is a predictable mixture of happy memories, word games, and deflection whenever the subject of the present is raised.

But things start to get weird when they collide with an old woman (Camilia Canó-Flaviá) in Ohio who seems to already know everything about the daughter. Then they pick up a father-daughter team of hitchhikers (Ryan King and Canó-Flaviá at her creepiest) and the daughter begins to worry that the silent little girl is being trafficked. At the drive-through of a Salt Lake City Wendy’s, they meet a cashier named Wendy (intense and hilarious Jessica Frey) who is disarmingly honest about her desires: “I’m looking for someone to get me pregnant so I can regurgitate my soul into my child and live forever,” she says through the crackling microphone with perfect sincerity before adding, “Merry Christmas!”

After what seems to be another road accident, we are transported to the realm of Christmas past, where Pillsbury Crescent Rolls are served with razor blades and every saccharine sentiment has a poisonous aftertaste. Party guests in festive attire (Normandy Sherwood’s costumes straddle the border between outlandish and realistic) taunt the daughter with infantilizing comments about her personal life as past and present blend into a sickening holiday tipple. Are these the memories of a deeply traumatized woman or the blackout recollections of a drunk? Perhaps both.

Director Sarah Blush maintains a frantic pace throughout, speeding down I-90 at 100 so that we never quite get a hold of the rules of this slippery play. It’s that feeling of disorientation that Dana seems most interested in sharing with the audience.

Stagehands use flashlights and cutouts to project the location as the car passes to each new state (delightfully analog lighting design by Cha See and Bev Fremin). John Gasper’s subtle and effective sound design underscores their encounters with strangers on the road with notes of tension.

But we know from the moment we enter the theater that we won’t be witnessing a kitchen-table family drama: Brittany Vasta’s fuzzy orange box of a set resembles a swanky sunken living room for cats, with the first half of the play performed around the edges. Only during the Christmas memories do the performers inter the soft interior. It makes for some striking stage pictures, although I kept wondering if the script might have benefited from a stealth attack that this Muppet boxing ring precludes.

But the play still punches you in the gut, thanks largely to sure-footed and heartrending performances by Greer and McKenzie, in whom we can see the legacy of addiction passed down like a family heirloom. When she finally tries to directly address the subject in a serious way, he refuses to even acknowledge what she’s saying — and her only response is a forced smile. It’s a détente that will feel painfully familiar to many families.

An imperfect reflection of an imperfect world, Racecar Racecar Racecar heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice off-Broadway, one that I suspect has a lot more to say.