1965UU

LONELY PLANET Lazar is a chatty extraterrestrial.

Photograph: Chocolate Factory

Less a dramatist than a wordsmith with an irrepressible showman’s flair, Mac Wellman has always crafted his unique stage worlds from webs of suggestive phrases, poetical fancies and disarmingly earthbound puns. But with 1965UU, one of several monologues from a new prose collection, A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds, Wellman literally imagines an alien planet—or, more precisely, a shiny metallic “planetoid,” where the blinding glare and the smooth, slippery surface create formidable barriers to connection among the lonely inhabitants. In the work’s crisp premiere, directed by Wellman specialist Steve Mellor, 1965UU manages a distinctive, if never quite soaring, orbit, with a simpatico cast and a smart, sleek design by Kyle Chepulis and Barbara Mellor.

On a long, narrow platform stage that evokes a Beckettian no-man’s-land, the chair-bound Mr. Ravenelo (downtown mainstay Paul Lazar) wakes from seeming hibernation at the prompting of a limpid-voiced offstage narrator (Heather Christian) and squints out at us like a rumpled mole. As Ravenelo tells it, life on his slick, bright planet has turned most people into monomaniacs or cranks. His own quiet obsession is an unrequited ardor for the peripatetic Rosalind (Kate Marks), who slides by repeatedly in stockinged feet without acknowledging him or his chief rival for her affections, the galumphing Al Bedo (Ed Jewett).

There’s a palpable tug of longing under Wellman’s welter of non sequiturs and verbal diversions, and Lazar’s no-sweat performance makes the flightiest perorations sound coolly conversational. Maybe too cool: 1965UU is more a brain-tickler than a full-body transporter.