Modern taps into Caisley’s brand of humor in ‘Lucky Me’

Sometimes the only way to overcome a string of personal misfortunes is to laugh: It might not fix anything, but it provides a brief catharsis. The characters in “Lucky Me,” which opens Friday at the Modern Theater Spokane, are funny, even though there always seems to be a rain cloud hovering over them.

“It’s billed as a comedy, but it’s got some humanity to it,” said the show’s director, Wes Deitrick. “We’re really focused on the humanity of it. It’s got some poignant moments and some stuff that’s pretty absurd, and it all seems to work, oddly enough.”

Written by Robert Caisley, “Lucky Me” is set entirely in the apartment of Sara Fine (played by Emily Jones in the Modern production), who lives with her cantankerous father, Leo (Rick Boal). He has recently lost his eyesight and is slipping further into senility, and he often forgets that he’s not living in his own apartment.

The play’s title is laced with a sharp irony, because the Fines are far from lucky. Sara’s life is a string of embarrassing hiccups: She’s recently injured her foot after falling off her roof, which is constantly leaking. All the light bulbs in her place keep blowing out. She’s given up on keeping pets because they either wander off or die.

“If a person gets a flat or too many speeding tickets, that’s unlucky,” Deitrick said. “We’ve all had our unlucky days, but here’s a couple of people that have had an unlucky couple of years.”

Leo is, for lack of a better term, a real S.O.B., and his presence is becoming a burden to Sara. And when two men – Tom (Brandon Montang), an airport security officer who lives next door, and Yuri (Sean Curran), the Ukranian landlord – start to get close to Sara, tensions between father and daughter finally boil over.

Caisley, a professor of theater at the University of Idaho, belongs to the same school of theater as Tracy Letts or Neil LaBute, blending pitch black comedy with precisely-drawn characters that keep fighting as life stacks the deck against them. Caisley’s play “Happy,” which was staged at the UI in 2014, was a dark comedy that grappled with the nature of personal fulfillment, and “Lucky Me” continues that thematic trajectory.

“There’s something in there about love and hope and forgiveness,” Deitrick said. “No matter how hard it gets, we seem to get through it. We’re resilient as hell, and in the end, we forgive and we embrace and we love, and it’s cool.”

Deitrick says he’s looking forward to seeing the show with an audience: Because Caisley’s humor is so cutting and his swings at emotion so unexpected, he’s curious to see how people react to the material.

“I think they’re going to laugh, and I think they’re going to get quiet when they feel something,” Deitrick said. “Whenever I direct a comedy, I get to the point where I don’t know if it’s funny anymore. You hear the same joke over and over again, and eventually you don’t laugh. But then audiences show up, and of course they’re laughing, because it’s funny.”