In ambitious 'Smokefall,' Backyard Renaissance launches its tenure as La Jolla Playhouse resident theater company
The worlds of playwright Noah Haidle's "Smokefall" are disparate and inscrutable. Act I (titled "Help Me Remember") unfolds in a Grand Rapids, Mich., that smacks of David Lynch's fictitious Twin Peaks, Wash. It's a baleful place where an old man's fading memory is only one of multiple family disturbances....