Surprises, gripping drama on menu at ‘Fred’s Diner’

The menu is on a chalkboard at “Fred’s Diner,” but don’t be surprised if the dishes contain ever more unexpected elements in the American premiere that opened the Magic Theatre’s season Friday, Sept. 25.

English playwright Penelope Skinner’s Bay Area debut draws you in with sharp, well-observed comedy of the low-wage working world in a roadside diner, but Skinner is merely laying the table for the darker, unsettling and more substantial material in store.

Not to mention creepy, in some respects liberating but laced with dashed hopes and redolent of enduring aspects of gender and class inequity.

At least one writer in the United Kingdom has called up-and-coming playwright Skinner “our leading young feminist writer,” and the story revolves around long-standing women’s issues from employment to certain forms of abuse.

The retro milieu and the songs blasting from the large jukebox (James Brown, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby) reflect the underlying sexism lingering in the landscape.

Nobody else would hire her after she’d served her sentence for killing her abusive husband.

Besides she has another possible option — weighed, denied and desired in McNeal’s richly layered, watchful performance, with so much more seething beneath the surface than Heather is willing to let on.

Lamb, oddly cast as an Indian (for a play in which ethnicity is something of an issue), plays the role with a gentle, easy naturalness and no hint of stereotyping.

[...] the Magic’s “Diner” is chilling proof of how wrong Chloe is when she says, Stuff like that doesn’t happen any more.