"Qualities of Starlight" ends up being a mess

– Dean wasn’t there to collect his $600 prize, or to see the world-premiere production that came with it. In his curtain speech, artistic director Peter Hardy said that Dean was out of town, workshopping another of his plays in New York.

Impressive, but that’s not all. While audiences sometimes wait years for new work by other Atlanta playwrights (Pearl Cleage, Steve Yockey), Dean has the distinction of having two of his scripts produced in the same season: last fall, Aurora Theatre mounted his reality-TV send-up “Buy My House … Please!” After many years on the local theater scene (primarily acting), he’s now pursuing an MFA degree in playwriting at the University of Texas in Austin.

In one sense, you might say, it’s all good.

In truth, my original AJC review described “Buy My House” as “opting for a softer touch instead of a sharper edge,” “too silly to be very insightful” and “entertaining in theory, not as written or executed.” Looking back on it, though, at least you could appreciate Aurora’s production values, their resources in dressing it up with a nice set and a couple of union co-stars.

Hardy’s low-budget Essential staging of “Starlight” is pretty much a mess, and not just because it takes place in a dump of a cabin, where a pair of crystal-meth addicts (and prospective grandparents) lives in hazy squalor. As if the material weren’t taxing enough, on opening night the show was regularly plagued by shaky lighting transitions and faulty sound cues.

At least two good actors are wasted in the process, literally as well as figuratively. Following a five-year hiatus – during which time she relished in a juicy role on the cable series “Army Wives” – you want to be happy to see the veteran Patricia French back on stage, not quite so embarrassed for her and prematurely exasperated by her. Even as hysterical “Jerry Springer junkies” and hallucinating speed freaks go, she’s way over the top.

Matt Felten plays her son, a rising astronomer home for a visit. If you’ve ever longed to see this talented Shakespeare Tavern stalwart in more contemporary pieces and out of Elizabethan costume, you may be sorry to learn that here it means wearing only a mortarboard and a diaper in one hallucination scene (bless his heart). It’s a close call, but better that than the recurring appearances by a lizard hand-puppet in the show.

The alleged comedy turns more serious (albeit no more grounded) during Dean’s second act, bogged down by various “crises of faith” involving everything from infertility to the “shared sadness of old age” to the “illusion of existence” itself. The effect is like being in detox, where the cure is almost as bad as the disease.

Theater review

“Qualities of Starlight”

Grade: D+

In repertory through Aug. 8. 8 p.m. Saturdays (July 24 and 31); 2 p.m. Sundays (July 25 and Aug. 1); 7 p.m. Sunday (Aug. 1); 8 p.m. Monday (Aug. 2); 8 p.m. Friday (Aug. 6). $16-$22. Actor’s Express, 887 W. Marietta St. (King Plow Arts Center). 800-595-4849. essentialtheatre.com.

Bottom Line: The qualities of the stars are eclipsed by the black hole of a script.