What You Wish For? A Musical of Safety Not Guaranteed

By
Sara Holdren,
a theater director and a critic at New York magazine and Vulture.

The elder-millennial faves are on the musical march: Sufjan Stevens and Will Butler have visited Broadway, soon to be joined by the Avett Brothers, and now, at BAM’s Next Wave festival, Guster’s Ryan Miller is reimagining his score for the 2012 indie film Safety Not Guaranteed, setting new (and some old) lyrics to its story of longing, regret, and possible time travel. “For most people, songs are like time machines,” says the character who claims to have figured out how to journey to the past, Kenneth Calloway (Taylor Trensch, glowering irresistibly in a scraggly mustache and Holden Caulfield hat). “They take you right back.” It’s a clever little nod from book writer Nick Blaemire: Not only are Guster’s songs themselves rife with nostalgia (“I want to relive all my adolescent dreams,” sings Miller in “One-Man Wrecking Machine”), they’re also exactly the kind of band that, if you’re a child of their heyday, will deliver a rush of early-aughts sense memory at the very mention of their name. Guster transports me directly to the driver’s seat of the black Volvo I’d take along Route 250 outside of Charlottesville, windows down, on the way to my high-school boyfriend’s house. Hey, Nathaniel.

It’s that kind of human wistfulness that powers Safety Not Guaranteed, rather than the “900,000 lumens” of laser power Kenneth says will jump-start the time machine he’s created. Though the title refers to a mysterious ad he’s placed in the local classifieds (“Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke … Must bring your own weapons … SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED”), the mournful humor here is that it applies to living life forward, too. As movie and as musical, Safety Not Guaranteed isn’t really dealing in hard sci-fi, but in the stumblings and bumblings of lonely weirdos learning to be a little less afraid of the world. In movie form, it’s got sweet 2010s shenanigans written all over it — Aubrey Plaza starred, still in high April Ludgate mode, with a sensitive Mark Duplass as Kenneth — and as a musical, it retains that sweetness.

Whether it fully earns its keep on the stage is another question. Despite several winning performances and a very big heart, the show feels sketchlike — not in the sense of SNL, but in the sense of an idea still being worked out. I’m convinced that this quality of patchiness doesn’t actually derive from an unfinished concept but from a disparity between content and container. At the big, beautiful BAM Harvey Theater, Safety Not Guaranteed feels like it’s in the wrong box. If this were a Fringe show, I kept thinking, I’d probably be completely charmed. There’s something about the Harvey’s scale and atmosphere — the peeling proscenium, the shades of Lev Dodin, Thomas Ostermeier, and Peter Brook — that seems to have stranded Safety’s director, Lee Sunday Evans, and scenic designer, Krit Robinson, somewhere between scrappy minimalism and bigger, slicker musical-theater impulses. Sometimes, we get an empty stage and low-fi rolling-chair choreo; other times, chonky scenic indicators fly in from above, and from what feels like a different theatrical universe. The show would profit from a more decisive embrace of one end of the aesthetic spectrum or the other, and for my money, it belongs in scrappyland. With an even more tinfoil-and-duct-tape Michel Gondryism about it, the energy of the whole thing might feel less diffuse, its earnestness harder to resist.

As it is, Safety is delightful by turns but also never builds up a consistent sense of dramatic grip or drive. This may also come down to the fact that some of its characters time-travel better than others. As the wary king of the nerds, Kenneth, Trensch is a gem, twitchy and silly and poignant. His character is, in almost every way, incel-coded — the off-grid project, the conspiracy vibes, the job at ShopRite, that hat — but existing before that idea did gives him the freedom to be refreshingly tender and toxicity-free. Likewise, the skeptical reporter Darius (Plaza’s role, here given warmth and gumption by Nkeki Obi-Melekwe) and her shy, buried-in-his-laptop co-worker Arnau (Rohan Kymal) make the jump with relative grace. But poor Jeff (Pomme Koch) lands on his face. Here, Jeff is Darius’s editor — when she brings him the idea for a story about this weird classified ad she’s found, he gives his indifferent okay, then decides to come along for the ride because he’s hoping to hook up with an old flame in the town she’s headed to. It’s a stretch. From the get-go, Jeff’s presence on this adventure feels forced. Really, even Arnau’s is underjustified, but we can stick with him as a character, whereas Jeff keeps reminding us that he’s a specific variety of asshole, the kind that was really having his moment back in 2010. In the movie, Jeff’s the reporter with the story: Darius and Arnau are the interns he drags along to do the work for him. (A stronger reason for these three misfits to pack into a car together.) “All right, gimme the lesbian and the Indian, and I got a story,” he cracks to his editor when the pair of them volunteer to come along. Blaemire has of course taken a red pen to that line for 2024, but he’s still given Jeff little to do beyond crushing beers and talking about crushing chicks. It’s not offensive — it’s just not effective either. We have no reason to want to hang out with this guy, let alone listen to him sing a whole song (“I Wanna Go Back”) about his desire to relive his high-school glory years.

Jeff’s douchebaggery might transfer more successfully to the right-now if he were, on the outside, a bit more of a freak. I wondered what a Jack Black type would be like in the role: Sure, he’s a Y2K clown prince if ever there were one, but his best performances hold up because, as big a dingus as he is onscreen, he also has no pretensions to normcore cool. Koch’s Jeff is a little too Dennis Reynolds without the farcical absurdity of Always Sunny’s context, and whenever the play hops away from Darius and Kenneth and over to this very bad editor’s nostalgia trip, the action sags. (Seriously, if you’re going to make the character into an editor, maybe don’t have him say things like, “I’m not good with, like, words and shit, and making sentences sound good.”)

Ashley Pérez Flanagan adds some charm to those scenes as Jeff’s old crush, Lizzie, and John-Michael Lyles is lovely as a winsome, self-possessed librarian who helps bring Arnau out of his shell. Still, the playing space seems to take the wind out of these B-plot relationships, fuzzying them instead of bringing them into full focus as part of Safety’s through-line. Likewise, Miller’s lyrics (mostly original, though a few Guster songs are folded into the mix) sometimes stray too far into rock territory — i.e., that specific kind of poetry that doesn’t really have to be clear as long as it’s full of images. “And so Miss Fortune spins again / All her predictions wearing thin,” sings Darius in her late-in-the-game number of revelation and betrayal:

The cards are there

Still dangerous

I can see what’s happening

Creatures sunk in a deep, dark sea

Where everything eats everything

And nothing is enough

That’s all great when you’re screaming along from the front row; less so when a character is trying to navigate what’s actually happening to them. Obi-Melekwe does her best to pour out her heart, but it’s hard for her, and for us, to make something solid out of Miller’s shifting metaphors, from fortune tellers to fish to “static electricity” and “a dead end sign / On a one way street.”

Elsewhere, Miller threads the rock-musical needle more elegantly. “Two Points for Honesty,” Guster’s hit closer off of 1999’s Lost and Gone Forever, makes an anthemic climax, and Safety’s title tune also manages to nail something specific and weirdly touching. “Didn’t they promise us some magic?” sings the disillusioned Darius. “Didn’t they tell us to ‘imagine’? / Yeah, they did.” That’s about as succinct an articulation as I’ve yet heard of the millennial existential crisis. Whatever Gen Z’s maladies, they won’t suffer from an excess of hope. We were the dreamers of dreams, and even when all the elements don’t quite all fall into place, it’s heartening to see our music-makers still telling stories that bend toward belief, not just in the pink-hued past, but in the future.

Safety Not Guaranteed is at BAM through October 20.

What You Wish For? A Musical of Safety Not Guaranteed