Motel Hell

In the 1950s, while atomic bomb tests were being conducted in painted deserts across the Southwest, small motels in the region advertised: “Come Here — Great Views!” Hundreds of nuclear families took the bait, cramming their kids into station wagons to witness the explosions.

When Scott Seiffert read about these perverse vacation spots, he couldn’t resist turning the subject into a play; an interest in the New Age movement seemed to provide the missing piece that would give his work a dose of jumbled reality. The result is The Atomic View Motel, making its Kansas City debut this weekend.

In the first act, two families arrive simultaneously at a Nevada motor lodge. One is a sitcom-perfect 1950s family, the other a contemporary blended family — they don’t interact. “But after the blast at the end of Act One, the two families come together,” Seiffert says of the comic clash of values that shows how things have changed and how they haven’t.

“It works on two levels,” Seiffert says from his Los Angeles office, where he is an assistant manager of creative content for Walt Disney Feature Animation. “It deals with adults’ and teens’ views of the world in the 1950s and today and how the lies they were told still affect them.”

Seiffert isn’t telling exactly what those lies are, but describes them as “lies like what a man should be and what a woman’s place in the world should be — how there were even certain chores that only boys could do or girls could do.” He adds that it bugs him when people wax nostalgic about that time. “We weren’t that innocent.”