‘Maple and Vine’ satirizes a not-so-simple 1950s

Through April 20. 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. $26-$45. Actor's Express (at the King's Plow Arts Center), 887 W. Marietta St., Atlanta. 404-607-7469, www.actors-express.com.

Bottom line: The lighter and less serious, the better.

Everything old is new again in “Maple and Vine,” a dark comedy by Jordan Harrison that transports a contemporary married couple away from their complicated big-city existence to a bygone era of quaint suburban tranquility circa 1955.

The wife, Katha, works at a well-known publishing company. The husband, Ryu, is a busy plastic surgeon of Japanese descent. Going through the motions of their monotonous daily routines (if that’s what you can call it when Katha’s suddenly banging her head on her desk), their lives have become hell — and even more desperate and empty following the recent miscarriage of their first child.

Can time (or time travel, at least) really heal all wounds? The couple is intrigued by the SDO, the Society of Dynamic Obsolescence, a “cult,” er, “gated community” of highly methodical ’50s re-enactors, where women embrace the domestic bliss of whipping up crab puffs and men earn an honest wage over at the neighborhood box factory. Every imaginable modern convenience is forbidden, right down to the fabric-appropriate clothes on their backs (no synthetics allowed).

“Maple and Vine” partly involves how Katha and Ryu acclimate to their new environment, and it’s partly about how the neighbors react to them — specifically in terms of their “mixed” marriage (in the pre-politically correct jargon of the day, they refer to Ryu as an “Oriental”). Other conflicts eventually develop, pitting the social conventions of the past against the liberated attitudes of the present.

Harrison’s clever conceit doesn’t hold up to much logical scrutiny, given the pervasiveness of 21st-century technology. Still, judging by director Kate Warner’s stylish production for Actor’s Express, the play operates most agreeably as diverting entertainment.

In a wonderful series of seminar lectures and counseling sessions delivered by co-stars John Benzinger and Tiffany Morgan, spelling out sundry do’s and don’ts as the guiding SDO organizers, the show is rather impossible to resist. They’re shrewdly believable, authentic to the period without exaggerating their characters.

But as a larger, thought-provoking commentary on the changing views about feminism, race and sexuality, “Maple and Vine” feels less inspired and too derivative (with obvious nods to such movies as “Pleasantville,” “Far From Heaven” and “The Stepford Wives”).

Murky dream sequences, replete with voice-over narration, fall flat. And Harrison’s episodic structure only makes it harder for Warner and company to create or maintain a consistent momentum. There are an inordinate number of fade-ins and fade-outs that slow the pace, and in several cases, the scene changes seem to last longer than the various vignettes themselves.

As Katha and Ryu, Kate Donadio and Michael Sung-Ho have the difficult task of transitioning between one extreme and the other. The heavier emotional and psychological aspects of their characters don’t always register as strongly as the more whimsical flights of fancy that gradually overtake them.

Sacrificing one type of freedom for another, as Katha puts it, mainly goes to show them that the more things change, the more they stay the same.