Review: An offbeat comedy takes a brutal turn in Echo Theater’s ‘Dido of Idaho’

“Dido of Idaho,” an offbeat comedy by Abby Rosebrock at the Echo Theater Company, takes a shockingly dark turn. There are other surprises in store for the audience, but the violence that occurs midway through the play is all the more intense for the outré humor that precedes and follows this unexpected atrocity.

At the center of the story is Nora (Alana Dietze), a 32-year-old untenured musicologist with self-esteem issues and a drinking problem. She’s caught in a futile romance with Michael (Joby Earle), a married English professor at the University of Idaho whose sensitivity can make it hard to see just how manipulative he can be.

He’s been promising Nora for a while that he’s going to leave his wife, but something always prevents him from taking this momentous step. Nora is starting to worry that she’s being played, but Michael has a way of coaxing her past her suspicions. She wants to believe in his goodness, but the real issue is that she just can’t imagine her sad, penurious life without him.

The play, presented in the round in a characteristically vibrant Echo Theater Company production under the acute direction of Abigail Deser, starts with Nora and Michael in bed listening to an aria in Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas.” This piece of music doesn’t bode well for Nora’s future. Dido’s love for Aeneas, of course, ends tragically, with Dido killing herself after her beloved abandons her to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome.

Michael, the default English department heartthrob who satisfies his artistic longings by publishing book-long cantos, isn’t fated for such greatness. But Nora’s passion is as obsessive as it is unbalancing.

What happens in “Dido of Idaho” sometimes strains credulity. To take one example, Michael leaves Nora alone in the home that he shares with his wife so that she can locate her underwear while he runs off to teach poetry to prison inmates. Would an inveterate adulterer, careful to keep his worlds apart, let his mistress have free rein in his other life?

Nora is hardly a model of stability or decorum. As soon as Michael leaves, she rummages through the condo, opens another bottle of wine and passes out on the bed they just spent a few fugitive hours making love in. When Crystal (Nicole DuPort), Michael’s radioactively chipper wife, a former Miss Idaho beauty contest runner-up, comes home and finds a strange woman passed out, the situation unwinds not at all as you might expect.

Rosebrock writes with the strange logic of dreams. Emotionally, the action of “Dido of Idaho” rings true even when plot points seem outlandish. But to give a sense of the whiplash induced by the play, one minute cookies are being baked while rum and coke is served, the next a manicure set transforms the women’s bonding session into a scene of Roman tragedy horror.

Two other characters figure in the play: Julie (Julie Dretzin), Nora’s disapproving, Bible-thumping mother, who is living with another woman, Ethel (Elissa Middleton), and slowly awakening to her lesbian sexuality. How this story line is integrated is rather difficult to explain without giving away secrets of the comedy’s curious construction.

Rosebrock’s strength as a writer is in the psychological particularity of her characters. There is no such thing as normal behavior in “Dido of Idaho,” which is to say that eccentricity is the norm. Quirkiness may run amok, but the moment-to-moment interactions of the characters have a wayward truthfulness. (This last remark could stand as a description of Echo Theater Company’s house style.)

All beauty pageant charm and perkiness, Crystal is like a Beth Henley character infused with a few drops of Martin McDonagh’s deranged fierceness. (DuPort’s sunshiny glee ratchets up the comic menace.) With reruns of “Designing Women” playing in the background of their emerging relationship, Dretzin’s Julie and Middleton’s Ethel have the close comfort of a lived-in pair of jeans. (Both actors are superb in underwritten scenes.) Earle’s Michael has a limited role, but the impression he leaves is necessary and disturbing.

What’s missing from “Dido of Idaho” is a sense of dramatic inevitability. There’s a willfulness to the story that isn’t always easy to overlook, though the fluid staging gives the events a natural flow. Amanda Knehans’ scenic design, making the most of in-the-round intimacy, allows the play to unfurl in the dreamscape of Nora’s mind.

How you relate to Nora’s psychological dilemma is another matter. I grew a little impatient with the wallowing in self-abjection, but Dietze forcefully inhabits the character’s damaged psyche. Nora may be complicit in her suffering, but that doesn’t make the pain she’s experiencing any less real.

It’s hard to build a play around self-loathing. Nora’s heroism, tentatively discovered only after she’s hit rock bottom, is in her refusal to follow in the self-destructive footsteps of Dido. Can she break out of the mythological trap of female victimization? Around this question, Rosebrock has spun a comedy that freely intermingles laughter, frustration, tears and shock.