Pomme Koch, Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, and Rohan Kymal in Safety Not Guaranteed. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

In 1997, magazine editor John Silveira wrote a fake classified ad as jokey filler in Backwoods magazine. It began: “Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke.” It went viral. Ten years later, screenwriter Derek Connolly came across it, and it inspired him to write an indie sci-fi comedy film that was released in 2012. Now it’s a musical, with a scrappy, wry, lo-fi energy that’s entirely in keeping with both the film and the music of the alternative rock band Guster, whose member Ryan Miller both scored the film and wrote the songs here (a few Guster tunes do make it into the song list, but feel more like fortuitous coincidence than jukebox musical). And while I don’t know that Safety Not Guaranteed ever entirely sells its case for becoming a musical, it takes the transition seriously, and finds its theatrical fit better than many a screen-to-stage adaptation–even if it doesn’t entirely stick the landing.

Book writer Nick Blaemire and director Lee Sunday Evans don’t lean on spectacle or technology to make the transition–quite the opposite. They tighten the ensemble of characters down to six winning performers, four main roles and two versatile utility players; Evans’s work shines with the latter, who play a handful of richly realized subsidiary characters apiece. Miller’s catchy tunes layer alt-pop melody over murky emotional depths—it’s hard to find the burst-into-song moments when your core characters are all trying to conceal their emotions from one another, but these songs fit the bill better than conventional musical-theater tunes would. Evans’s staging and Krit Robinson’s set make good use of the BAM Harvey’s aesthetic of genteel decay, saving all the bells and whistles for a few key climactic scenes (aided by Steve Cuiffo in the illusions department). Nick Blaemire’s book pares the plot down to a handful of eventful days that end with a bang and a cliffhanger while also taking a gentle look at how we make peace with our pasts as we move through adulthood. 

Darius (Nneki Obi-Melekwe), a young staffer at a dying magazine, notices the classified ad at the laundromat (a clever touch; what papers even have classifieds anymore outside of laundromat freebies?). She’s been trying to land a story pitch for months to no avail, but when she runs this one by her editor, Jeff (Pomme Koch), he recognizes the locale of the reply-to PO box as a town where he has unfinished romantic business with a high school flame (Ashley Pérez Flanagan, in one of multiple roles). (Or so he thinks.) Facing down the looming death of his industry, Jeff thinks a little retreat back into the past seems like a great idea. Armed with this covert mission of his own, Jeff greenlights the story–as long as he can come along to hook up, um, supervise; they also bring along researcher Arnau (Rohan Kymal), an introverted gamer who’s inching his way out of the closet. 

After a very funny stakeout at the PO box, they track down their target—an intense oddball named Kenneth Calloway (Taylor Trensch), who’s convinced both that he’s the target of surveillance by shadowy forces and that he’s built 99 percent of a time machine. The thing is…he might be right about both, and Trensch gives him enough inspired intensity that we can’t quite write him off. All he needs is some high powered lasers and an accomplice. When Jeff tries and fails to gain Kenneth’s trust, Darius gets sent in and hits the right note of shared conspiracy, genuine interest, and craziness to get inside Kenneth’s plot. Obi-Melekwe and Trensch play off each other well, as both try to get to the root of the other’s motivations without revealing too much of their own. 

As Darius gets closer to Kenneth and tries to figure out why he wants to go back in time as well as how, Jeff pursues his old flame–in beautifully douchey fashion; Koch perfectly embodies his serene obliviousness–and Arnau hits it off with a cute librarian. (John-Michael Lyles comes close to stealing the show in many of his bit parts, including an old man visiting his PO box, but he’s a ray of light here. Lyles as the librarian and Ashley Pérez Flanagan as both Jeff’s and Kenneth’s exes are the most grounded and straightforward figures in the show; they’re rooted in lives in the present, unlike our core four, who are yearning for a different past or a different future.)

Jeff wants to go back to his adolescence when he felt like king of the world, instead of pushing forty in a dying industry. Kenneth wants, we’re told, to save the life of someone he loved. Arnau, when he finally looks up from his computer, starts to see a brighter future. There’s genuine poignancy to all of their yearnings—yes, Jeff is a jerk, but we see what he’s trying to get back. How do we live in the present with the choices we made in the past? And how do we atone for mistakes we can’t go back to fix—and what would we do if we thought we could? But for a while, we don’t really know what Darius wants to fix in her past, only that she’s not satisfied with her present.

Where the movie centers on Jeff, the musical puts Darius in the spotlight: her story pitch, and her tentative growing belief in Kenneth’s implausible scheme, drive the play. Yet while Blaemire’s plot puts her at the center, the character arcs for Jeff, Arnau, and even Kenneth still feel clearer. Darius’s drive to get the story feels like something she’s doing because she’s supposed to be professionally ambitious, not as rooted in her own wants and needs as Kenneth’s quixotic quest, Arnau’s first steps from online to IRL connection, or even Jeff’s blinkered march toward a confrontation with reality. She throws herself wholeheartedly into the plan, even as she starts to doubt her own ethical compass in her dealings with Kenneth. But after a slow build, the final scenes whiplash from betrayal to confessional to rebuilt trust to a final leap of faith that Safety Not Guaranteed sells with a flourish of magic instead of emotional truth. It gets close to all the way there, but I wish it spent just a little more time on its groundwork, especially with Darius, before leaping into the abyss.