Julia Greer and Bruce McKenzie in Racecar Racecar Racecar. Photo: Travis Emery Hackett

A palindrome is a word or phrase or sentence that reads the same forwards and backwards: it can be as simple as “mom” or “dad” or weird as “Tulsa nightlife: filth, gin, a slut.” Either way, it’s language that mirrors itself: a sentence that turns on a dime in the middle and goes back to the beginning. It’s a teeny tiny hiccup in time, if you think about it a certain way: one step forward matched by one step back. You know exactly what’s coming in the second half of a palindrome, in other words, just like you know a round-trip ticket will bring you home in the end. But somehow Racecar Racecar Racecar, a tart and tightly crafted new play by Kallan Dana, surprises you anyway. The secret sauce of the piece, with its triple palindrome right there in the title, is that it never plays a trick on you, never throws a radical plot twist–and yet it punches you in the gut just the same, with a sneaky devastation I didn’t quite see coming. 

Palindromes are the word game that a father (Bruce McKenzie) and one of his adult daughters (Julia Greer) play on a cross-country road trip from NYC to California: a trip itself in the shape of a palindrome, there and back again. The game is their way of talking without revealing (though when they pick up a hitchhiker who drops that Tulsa palindrome, you realize there could be plenty of ways to sneak something darker into a palindrome as well). The ostensible reason for the trip is for the father to clear out a storage area, but from the beginning something a little off shimmers around the edges. 

Greer is bright and gung-ho, McKenzie gruff but jolly, yet even the banal kickoff conversations they have at the beginning are full of small evasions; there’s a falsity in Daughter’s cheer and a menace in Dad’s reminiscing. (No one is better than Bruce McKenzie at showing the emotional nail sticking up from the floorboards, the snag where the narrative fabric catches on the smooth surface of a man’s character.) Maybe they’re both trying a little too hard to be upbeat, but fathers and daughters sometimes don’t know what to say to each other. Maybe she doesn’t want to invite her father up to meet her boyfriend, but there could be a lot of reasons for that. It’s clear that these two people aren’t 100 percent comfortable around each other–there’s an occasional edge of nastiness, of issues unresolved: The parents’ divorce. Daughter’s working as a waitress rather than some other not-quite-fulfilled career, learning that “the less I care, the better I am.” Some significant gaps, or discontinuities, in her memories of her childhood. Two other sisters who are not on this trip.  

Dana’s language has a chipper surface, bright and stylized and punctuated with little detours of hesitation. But that language also conceals as much as it says, and director Sarah Blush leans in to all its hiccups and needle-skips, its little stutter-steps in time and verb tense. (“Could still used to be” is a perfect example, nostalgic and conditional and full of false hope all at once.) We’re never in a realist place of emotional disclosure and deep truths, but rather a place where you tiptoe around the edges of a reveal and then dart back, where points are less made than slowly excavated. The perimeter of Brittany Vasta’s set, a conversation pit carpeted in pale orange, serves as highway, car, and trap: the play’s peripheral characters come from outside of it, but Dad and Daughter rarely leave. 

As the states roll by (indicated, in a clever homespun way, with handheld projected title cards that call to mind the overhead projectors of a seventies childhood, accompanied by what I think are swirls of sound from backwards records), the discomfort starts to build. The encounters they have with others along the way add another menacing note–an aggressive man at a rest stop (Ryan King); a father and daughter hitchhiking pair they pick up (King and Camila Canó-Flavia); a Wendy’s cashier whom Dad seems to be flirting with (Jessica Frey). (Normandy Sherwood’s costumes define each of these people perfectly in snapshots.) Again, Blush keeps perfect control of the play’s tone as it lurches closer to and farther from realism, as the sinister undercurrents ebb and flow. 

Strangers keep mistaking father and daughter for husband and wife. Daughter’s anxiety and Dad’s callousness flare brighter and brighter. The past and the future start impinging on the present, and little clues start to add up to something far more destructive and damaged than the canonical “voyage and return” plot that’s laid down. We start to see what all those evasions are concealing, the thin surface of a functional life laid over a gaping wound of estrangement and addiction and patterns that neither Dad nor Daughter is able to break. 

California is where Daughter grew up, and the nearer they get, the more she doesn’t want to go back. At a certain point, they slip from palindromes to a childish mirroring of each other’s speech (I know you are but what am I?), and everything literally comes crashing down. (With another extremely effective piece of low-tech stagecraft that I won’t spoil.) And as they hit this low point and then boomerang back to the East Coast (those handheld title cards, now projected backwards), we also travel through time to the beginning of their family, of their relationship, of the lies they’ve been telling each other and themselves–and even to a possible future. We see Daughter’s sisters (Canó-Flavia and Frey), and in stepping outside Daughter’s perspective, we start to see how much has been concealed. 

But alongside these terrifying moments of vulnerability and cruelty we also see the pattern of papering the cracks back over. The palindrome game becomes a deep metaphor for the most destructive thing they share: ”a shame of doubling, a doppelganger shame, a mirror.“ (One particular monologue, where Dad talks about his intimate familiarity with Daughter at her worst–the legacy he’s left her–will stick with me for a long time: I just crash [inside your eyeballs] sometimes when I’m between jobs, yeah I make decisions for you or just observe if I’m too burnt out.)

We can’t unsee what we’ve learned about Dad and Daughter, about the destructive way they’re twinned. But the metaphor will also hold: when the trip ends, they’ll go back to where they started.