With The Borderland, the Rep props up shabby, worn-out material

A corollary to Anton Chekhov’s rule of plots, which holds that a gun seen above the fireplace in Act 1 must be fired in Act 3: Any stage set depicting a white-walled home of remarkable cleanliness must, in the third act, suffer besmirchment. Ideally, that soiling will illustrate a moral point that the homeowners, invariably well-off white people who are out of touch with life and passion, dared to hope for security and cleanliness. This is wrong of them.

I have to give the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s The Borderland — because it’s promoted as a thriller — this much: Its thrills mostly thrill. Expertly staged by director Kyle Hatley and his top-flight craftspeople, the jolts of lightning and power outages and shock realizations (he’s in the window!) never come when we’re braced for them. The scares kick with a nasty power that the rest of the show doesn’t measure up to.

Outside those scares — and the marvelous thunderstorm — the only real surprises in this distressingly predictable, glumly self-important yuppies vs. hicks Southern melodrama lie in discovering just what specific stupidities playwright Jim Grimsley will employ to keep the story going.

It seems that Gordon, an Atlanta accountant (Matthew Rapport), has moved to the country with Helen (Carla Noack), the wife whom (a) he has talked into quitting her job and (b) he can’t knock up. We know it’s Gordon’s fault that Helen isn’t pregnant because he later proves incapable of handling a gun — just one of the many facile, reductive, too-easy emasculations that Grimsley visits upon him.

One night, Gordon and Helen recline in their beautiful, newish country home and, in one of those how was your day? conversations, they stiffly establish their backgrounds and problems. Rapport sounds natural only when his character is panicked; when chitchatting with Noack’s Helen, he comes across more as a co-anchor than her husband.

The audience’s problems let up when Gordon and Helen’s problems really get started. The strong but underutilized Angela Cristantello shows up as Eleanor, a battered neighbor. Her husband is drunk, she explains through tears and stage blood, and she needs to use the phone. She then haunts their home in polite near catatonia, ma’am-ing and sir-ing and going out of her way not to dirty up the whiteness.

Soon enough, her husband, Jake, shows up looking for his wife. Played by Matthew Brumlow as a full-on, lit-up shitkicker menace, Jake is at first a relief. He keeps secrets, plays rough and shouts some choice threats at Gordon, who has been browbeaten into pretending that Eleanor isn’t in the house.

Jake knows, for several reasons, that Gordon is lying. First, Jake might be uneducated, but he’s no dummy. Second, Grimsley has made it all too clear that Jake represents some wild truth of the wilderness, while the house and Gordon stand in for some transparent and corrupt civilization. Finally, Jake knows that Gordon is lying because Gordon, Helen and Eleanor stood right in front of the goddamned bay windows looking for him out in the dark.

Brumlow’s Jake comes and goes with the only swagger or charisma in the show, sometimes appearing from nowhere in those wide, appealing windows that dominate Meghan Raham’s remarkable set. Sadly, even his appeal doesn’t last.

From here on, I’m talking about the ending, so stop reading if you think there’s a surprise to spoil it.

By the end, after the electricity has been shut off, the house has been besmirched, the door has been left unlocked and Jake has out-manned Gordon more times than I could count, Gordon is called upon to deliver a long, unbelievable speech on the socioeconomic realities of what has transpired.

Elsewhere, Grimsley has written about the South with rich insight. Here, he merely lards up a standard-issue home-invasion story with pedantic nonsense meant to pass as theme. Often, the weak passages dealing with the clash between country and city or the anxieties that city men feel in the country (Gordon can’t have a kid; Jake has five) simply feel like justifications for the lurid story. A country boy scaring the city folks away from the land that he feels is his? For all its well-timed horrors, Jake could be in a fright mask and this could be a downbeat Scooby-Doo.

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