Dana Scurlock and Jack Difalco in Inspired By True Events (Photo: Thomas Brunot)

Stage managers handle a lot. In this new play by Ryan Spahn, Inspired by True Events, the stage manager at Rochester Community Theater ends up dealing with issues well outside the bounds of what Equity expects and then some. She may be cleaning up the green room, brewing coffee, and chasing away mice but there are much bigger problems in store.

Falling somewhere between a real-time minutiae drama, backstage comedy, and true crime “mystery,” the play is all over the place. Director Knud Adams cannot unite this zig-zag material. While there are some laughs here and there, the play’s emotional climax fizzles.

Colin (Jack DiFalco) is the young star of a hit show at this community theater. Mothered by longtime family friend and stage manager Mary (Dana Scurlock), it is the day after opening night and he is spiraling. Mary is trying to keep everything together while the leading man is falling apart. She reminds him to take his meds and get some rest in the hopes this might set him right after he has broken up with his girlfriend.

The rest of the cast are happy for the good reviews but a bit nervous to deal with stressful family members who are coming to see the show. Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) blasts into the theater with the freshly laundered cast costumes and scraped knees from a bike accident rambling a mile-a-minute. Racing from work, Robert (Lou Libertore) is late for his call time but still has time to battle the mice in the theater vents with a rapier before going on stage.

The struggle here is that Spahn just doesn’t know how to bring together all the threads, ideas, and emotional beats of the play. Is this a serious, thoughtful character development play or is this zany theatrical mayhem in the face of horror? Not that those two extremes could not co-exist but here neither genre is entirely successful in its own right. But then you marry them together and it’s a play in need of a divorce.

At only 90-minutes, the character development is incomplete so the “tender” moments with Mary and Colin do not resonate. The backstage, inside-baseball theater stuff has bits of fun, but there’s too much focus on tiny details and real-life moments (did we need to see the characters clean the room, make a pot of coffee, apply all their make-up, do voice exercises). It drags down the tempo. We instantly know where we are. I’m not sure we need more “realism.” Worse, these moments do not reveal enough about the characters to make them worth the time they are taking.

Portnoy enlivens the dragging show immediately as a vain, local actress ranting about podunk Rochester, her rival theater and actors, and her excitement at the rave reviews this show has garnered. Peppering her sentences with “J’agree,” she’s a hoot and a half and I only wish this was a vehicle designed entirely around her. She understands exactly who her character is and she commits. There is a specificity to Eileen that is lacking in the other characters.

The centerpiece relationship of the play is the unexplained mother-son dynamic between Mary and Colin. We are given a sprinkling of vague details but the actors cannot otherwise fill in the giant gaps. This intense intimacy borders on the creepy. There is something offbeat from the start so revelations later don’t come as a huge surprise.

DiFalco’s Colin is anguished and unsettled but he doesn’t really have anywhere to go with his character. Scurlock is appropriately warm and accommodating but the play fails to give Mary a whole story. She is a device to react to the other characters and not much more.

The show is staged in the small green room of the theater at 154 Christopher Street with a tiny audience. There is a monitor of the stage (using the real stage at the theater) where we can see the actors “go on” while the others remain in the green room for their scenes with us.

The sound design by Peter Mills Weiss is incredible in this space. Thunking mice in the vents, the hum of the audience filing into the theater, and off-stage crashes are perfectly calibrated for this staging.

We are close enough to the actors that we can smell the deodorant spray applied and air freshener. Thankfully we do not get a whiff of the imaginary rank odor coming from the vents where the last mouse outbreak was discovered.

Our proximity to the performances would be great if the material got us to lean in. But I mostly I had to stare at my own face in the backstage mirror for 90 minutes and that is it’s own kind of horror.