Melissa Claire Photo by Miller Oberlin

So it is for Becky (Melissa Claire), who is married to Joe (Matt Witthaus) and employed in the finance department of a local car dealership, where she feels overworked and underappreciated. At home, she's worried her 26-year-old son will never leave the nest. We know all this because in Becky's New Car, currently in production by Sonoma Arts Live, Becky tells us. She speaks directly and openly to the audience about her desire for something different, something new, maybe even something exciting. She enlists our help in solving some of her problems, like the bucket she gives to someone in the audience to catch the drips from her leaky ceiling. Or asking another patron to collate and staple a pile of documents.

This regular breaking of the fourth wall (actually, it doesn't break, because it's never really there) serves to reinforce the idea that Becky wants another life, another existence—and if she can't find one in the story, she'll use ours. Fortunately for the shyer members of the audience, a potential new life appears at work one night, when Walter (Mike Pavone) wanders into the showroom. In need of Christmas gifts for his employees he buys nine cars from Becky. Their eyes meet and in them Becky sees a new world for herself.

Despite crisp direction from Carl Jordan and some solid performances from the cast, Becky's New Car suffers from a fatal flaw: playwright Steven Dietz has failed to establish a compelling reason as to why we should believe Becky wants something different. Husband Joe is kind, thoughtful, understanding, sexy, loyal. Yes, their son is still living in the basement, but that's hardly tragedy enough to justify the decisions Becky seems ready to make.

On the surface, Becky's New Car is quirky and colorful and often quite funny. But like a bag of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, where every once in a while among the blueberry and marshmallow flavors you will find an earwax or rotten egg flavored bean, the dark side of Dietz's play makes it presence known in surprising ways. There is weirdness and coincidence and twists of fate that take Becky's New Car into interesting—if sometimes unsettling—ground. When car salesman Steve (Stephen Dietz—apparently no relation to the playwright) tells Becky what he'd really like to say to the child who thought petting his puppy would improve his mood, you can feel the play shift into a parallel universe of its own.

Becky's New Car plays through June 25, 2017, at the Rotary Stage in Andrews Hall at the Sonoma Community Center, 276 E Napa St, Sonoma, CA. Shows are Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are $26-37 and available at SonomaArtsLive.org.