What is the play about? On the most concrete level, a tempestuous soap opera actress named Ada, played by the gifted TV farceur Wendie Malick, is killed off after 27 years of non-fatal skydiving accidents and other daytime disasters. She doesn’t handle the news well.
What might make for shallow but bright character comedy takes several turns for the darkly surreal. Haidle is a rising young playwright whose earlier works - “Mr. Marmalade,’’ “Saturn Returns,’’ “Persephone’’ (produced at Boston’s Huntington Theatre in 2006 by Williamstown artistic director Nicholas Martin) - have marked him as a talent to watch. On the evidence of “Thunder,’’ he’s still not sure what he’s trying to say.
The play swings back and forth between Ada’s richly absurd soap opera storyline and her marginally less melodramatic life at home. The joke, obvious to begin with and hammered into the ground as “Thunder’’ rolls on, is that she can’t tell the difference. The primary victim of this confusion is Ada’s daughter Ophelia - “Everyone thinks I’m a metaphor,’’ she complains - neurotic, chain-smoking, and nine months pregnant by a boyfriend with one foot out the door.
Betty Gilpin, a rubber-faced changeling of a young actress, plays Ophelia as well as everyone else who isn’t Ada. She’s particularly funny as her mother’s TV twin daughters, scheming Bathsheba and hapless Harper, the latter forever fading in and out of a coma. Gilpin also pops up in the first scene as a dissatisfied nun, bringing the day’s awful news to Ada’s long-suffering soap heroine, and later as Ophelia’s unborn child, brimming with a hope her future grandmother does her best to squash.
