Tantalizing 'What Then' keeps audience guessing

WELLFLEET -- It's rare to walk out of a play feeling both mystified and delighted. But that's the effect of the baffling, beguiling production of Rinne Groff's "What Then" at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater: I don't know what to make of it, and I can't stop thinking about it.

Let's start with what we can say for sure. A woman named Diane tells her husband, Tom, that she has quit her accounting job and plans to spend most of her time asleep, dreaming up a better world than the toxic, water-starved, globally warming one they inhabit. When he objects that she needs a job, she replies that this is her job: In her sleep, she says, she is now an architect, and she's dreaming up a housing complex, complete with shared gardens and a velvet-lined conveyor belt.

Tom explodes: This is all ridiculous and it doesn't exist.

"It doesn't not exist," Diane serenely replies, "just because you can't experience it."

Okaaay. So far, so comic: A mildly farcical marital argument; let's see if she turns out to be merely whimsical or deeply delusional. Or, even, if this is one of those plays, if she's the one dealing with a deeper reality and he's trapped in a nightmarish "real" life by his own prosaic mind.

Time passes; characters enter: Tom's recovering-addict daughter, Sallie, and a mysterious guy who's also named Tom -- or, more fully, Bahktiyor Tomashevsky. This Tom is Sallie's boyfriend. No, he's a drug dealer. No, he's the landscape architect Diane has hired in her dreams, and he's helping her plant tomatoes to leach toxins out of the soil. No, he's a refugee from Karakalpak.

Aha! Karakalpak -- obviously a ridiculous name. So this is all a dream.

Not so fast. Karakalpak, it turns out, is an actual republic, somewhere near Uzbekistan. It's on the Aral Sea, once the world's fourth-largest body of fresh water and now a parched desert of toxic salts. Hmm . . . that sounds a lot like the lake where Diane is dreaming up her utopia -- the lake that, possibly, her husband's ominously secretive corporate job has helped destroy, the lake that . . .

Ordinarily, by this point I'd be rolling my eyes and dreaming of the exit. But what's wonderful about "What Then" is that it leads us along by the nose, right up to the end and beyond, without ever making us lose patience. I don't know what's "real" here and what's a dream, or even, honestly, whose dream it might be. And while a hint of clarity would be a welcome gift by the end, the journey there is so beautifully constructed and, line by line, so intelligently written that, even in bafflement, I don't regret having made the trip.

Part of what makes the play tantalizing instead of frustrating is the expertly crafted staging it receives here. Under Rand Foerster's crisp direction, there's no hint of woolly avant-gardism or "experimental" self-indulgence; whatever reality these characters are inhabiting, each of the four actors on stage is utterly grounded in it. Like set designer Jackie Levinson's meticulously detailed evocation of a chic suburban kitchen, the actors' absolute clarity about what they're doing, even when we don't have a clue, keeps us willing to stay with them.

Thus Cait Langstaff's Diane is dreamy but not goofy; we believe that she believes what she's saying, even if we find it unbelievable. Michael Balconoff's Tom, meanwhile, seems at first a stereotypical workaholic corporation man, then grows more surprising and interesting with each scene; Amanda Collins gives Sallie a touching, plausible mix of fury and need. And Lewis D. Wheeler is simply grand as Tomashevsky: charming, mercurial, and just the kind of large-spirited dreamer that Diane might dream up.

Unless he dreamed her up -- or did the other Tom dream them both? And what then of Sallie, and the funny/sad anthem to self-pity that she gets all the others to sing with her? No, wait, it's Diane we always see asleep, lying on the elegant island of her dream kitchen. It's Diane who wishes for snow (another hint, perhaps: the play's original title, "Of a White Christmas") and Diane, I think, whose dream comes true -- unless that snow is really toxic salt.

Whatever it is, I want to see it again.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.