Theatre in Review: How to Live on Earth (Colt Coeur/HERE)The characters in How to Live on Earth want to be sent to Mars, never to return, and, having spent 90 minutes with them, I heartily endorse the plan. The playwright, MJ Kaufman, posits a countrywide search for volunteers for the aforementioned mission; we are told that 100,000 people sign up. One supposes that this is a government program, although the script never says so, but, in any case, it's unclear why random members of the populace are being solicited for this excruciatingly difficult, dangerous enterprise -- instead of, you know, trained astronauts. It's even less clear why 100,000 people would want to vacate this planet for all time, with early death a near certainty. If How to Live on Earth were a much better play, the premise wouldn't really matter, but Kaufman has assembled a crew of the sketchiest, least appealing characters to come our way in several months. For example, most of them are stunned to discover that their loved ones aren't ecstatic about bidding them goodbye forever. There's Omar, who is bored with being a computer programmer. Omar's boyfriend, Rick, is clearly not happy about the whole plan. Omar, trying to reassure him, says, "We'll just be starting the longest long-distance relationship in the history of the universe!" Eleanor, a librarian who pushes her organizational skills as essential to establishing a Martian colony, starts dating Russ, a spoken-word artist. When he pulls back, making the obvious point that, if she goes, they will never see each other again, Eleanor says, "Even if I did go, I wouldn't stop loving you." To be fair, the obtuseness cuts both ways. Aggie, a college-age young lady born to privilege but currently working at a pizza joint, signs on for the program, seemingly to get her father's attention. She coyly drops hints about Mars, and fails to pique his interest. Frustrated, she snaps, "Aren't you concerned about how I can never come back from there?" "Depends where it is," Dad replies. "If it's prison, then yes, probably." It becomes increasingly tiresome watching this clueless crew stumble around, trying to work out personal problems for which the solutions are stunningly obvious. (As Ann Landers would have said, "Wake up and smell the coffee!") Clearly, the play is about people who are afraid of intimacy, but because nobody -- the would-be galactic travelers and the earthbound alike -- has more than a single dimension, it's impossible to have any interest in their fates. The play is especially weak at identifying the lure of outer space; the playwright's solution is to have each character fall into a fugue state from time to time, as if he or she is falling into the cosmos. By the 60-minute point, I was more than ready to export all them to a galaxy far, far away. Under Adrienne Campbell-Holt's direction, the cast provides occasional grace notes. Genesis Oliver makes something genuinely amusing of Omar's video audition, in which he attempts to put his best foot forward but keeps circling back to inconvenient truths, such as his membership in AA. Molly Carden is surprisingly likable as Aggie, who discovers that working at Pizza Planet might be as rewarding as life on the Red Planet. Lynne Lipton makes something mildly touching out of a rushed, barely intelligible Skype call to her son in space. Charles Socarides impresses once again, as Russ, who, amusingly, finds success as the author of one-word poems, and as Bill, the group's smuggest overachiever; when we meet him, he is "in Central Africa researching uses of lion fat in traditional African medicine." He adds, "I'm also getting to know some lions on an interpersonal basis," a worrying fact, given that Wim Wenders' Grizzly Man is his favorite film. The set designer, Amy Rubin, has provided a largely neutral space that efficiently stands in for a number of locations; it features an upstage scrim that serves as a surface for the cosmic imagery supplied by Lianne Arnold. Occasionally, Grant Yeager supplies backlighting effects that bleed through the scrim, creating eye-catching tableaux of bodies suspended in space. Ashley Rose Horton's costumes suit the characters well. The sound designer, M. L. Dogg, includes ambient restaurant noises, television programs, a rocket launch, an agonizingly accurate example of Skype gone awry, and a rendition of "Eye of the Tiger." Overall, considering the production's limited budget, this is a fairly sensible design for a show that makes a number of unusual demands. It's too bad that nobody made any demands on Kaufman to put some flesh and blood on his characters. This is a distressingly weak offering, suggesting that the creation of recognizable human beings is not this author's forte. Kaufman, like everyone else in How to Live on Earth, seems to have his head in outer space. -- David Barbour 
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