Darwin in Malibu

Except for huge sounds of waves, the flowery bamboo-furniture-filled beach house in Darwin in Malibu has the peaceful solitude conducive to Charles Darwin's reading. It's a novel as sexy as the young girl, Sarah, in cut-offs, serving him banana milk shakes. She (a langorous Leigh Ann Wolf) herself has been reading what he calls a "dangerous thing," a diary that makes her recall a boyfriend having a hot night with a "bitch" not far away in Bakersfield. Darwin (way-too-detached Stephen Temperley) would rather she didn't obsess about the "truth" in the diary. As if on cue comes a visit from scientist Thomas Huxley, who at Victorian Oxford championed Darwin's theory of evolution in a famous debate with Bishop Wilberforce. Both share grief over the death of a daughter. Why are any of them now in Malibu?

Toting baggage that Sarah has to help him with, in from the beach comes Wilberforce (whom Doug Jones mercifully resists playing stiffly), still in clerical garb and sweating profusely. Soon he and the two scientists are arguing the eternal questions of the origins and processes of life and either its end or immortality. The fact that they and Sarah are all dead yet alive here is just one of the play's inconsistencies and subjects that fall flat.

As for Wilberforce coming from Alabama: that he's disappointed not to be in heaven is to the point. He seems to want to hurry his trip there by converting Darwin to Christ. As at Oxford, Huxley (astute David Breitbarth) challenges Wilberforce to produce evidence that humans are ultimately merely machines meant to replicate and later die. Of course, author Whittell is setting up a repeat of a rather shopworn debate over Biblical truth, with Wilberforce on the side of it being literal enough that events in Genesis, for example, may be dated. Obviously, Huxley, champion of scientific method, isn't buying any of Wilberforce's ideas.

Darwin seems to be around mainly to pursue funny conclusions of what happiness in heaven may consist of. Sarah speculates about the Christian Incarnation. They do this hardly differently than they discuss astrology, although committed to continuing such studies of nature as faults and plates. The debate format fades as the Bishop concludes they've veered from essentials, and Darwin pronounces that consciousness of death is all that distinguishes human beings from animals.

As a kind of epilogue, Sarah seems to reveal she's Darwin's daughter but definitely promotes a Deistic view of things in nature being everywhere and nowhere. It could be a description not of nature but this play. And while the performances of Asolo regulars Jones and Breitbarth are nuanced and engaging, guest performer Temperley is laid back to the point of seeming like he's dropped in as a tourist.

The highlight of the production is Jeffrey W. Dean's inviting beach house, brilliantly lit by James A. Florek. Music and sounds of nature mix well in Kevin Kennedy's design. But the play and production come to less than the sum of their parts, never evolving.