THEATER REVIEWS : Playwright Thwarts Romance of ‘Comedy’

WESTMINSTER —  A cynic might note that Bernard Slade is trying to inoculate himself against criticism of his three-act “Romantic Comedy” by dramatizing how difficult it is to write a funny play. If it’s this tough, then please, cut the poor man some slack.

Watching the 1983 Arthur Hiller-Dudley Moore film version, this cynic certainly felt that this was Slade’s game, a distraction, perhaps, from the thin goods on screen.

On stage at the Westminster Community Theatre, that feeling persists--with the added feeling that any production that comes close to pulling it off, as director Lee Clark’s staging sometimes does, earns some respect. Realizing a good play is hard work; realizing a bad play builds character.

Slade’s is a bad play for the most fundamental of reasons: We are always ahead of it, always mentally opening the door for it as it saunters through with its new plot twist.

There’s very little a director or actors can do to manage this problem. Clark, Don Myers as Jason (famed scribe of, you guessed it, romantic comedies) and Sydney Thorton-Smith as Phoebe (Jason’s biggest fan and would-be playwright) work very hard at it, nevertheless.

Myers’ approach is not to appear to be working hard at all. His Jason still contains some of the overweight adolescent boy Slade describes (in possibly autobiographical tones), reinventing himself as a popular Broadway playwright, sacrificing any emotional involvements to the work at hand.

In the movie, Moore simply played him as a jerk; here, Myers plays him as a potential mensch who just doesn’t pick up on other people’s feelings, which makes him come off as a jerk. Big difference.

Thorton-Smith has a harder time managing the journey Phoebe takes from innocent schoolteacher off the bus from Vermont to world-beating playwright-novelist eclipsing Jason’s own fame.

In between, she becomes his writing partner, and their first collaboration is, of course, a bomb. Her fall from eager pupil to crushed neophyte is easily the play’s, and production’s, high-water mark.

But Phoebe’s maturation is written and played with a false schematic manipulation: Thorton-Smith’s return, after her creative divorce, comes off as a pose, which she doesn’t handle remotely as well as the early innocence.

This New Phoebe, dressed to kill, is phony to begin with, a complete violation of the true, romantic-at-heart Phoebe. The Jason-Phoebe collaboration is really Slade’s celebration of an earlier Broadway era when comedy writing believed in true love, despised unfaithful spouses and knew nothing about the real world.

And true love means--as we can predict long before Act III--that Jason will part from wife Allison (a bland Melinda Parker), Phoebe will part from husband Leo (a too young and miscast Kevin O’Loane), and the collaboration will resume. This is romance with all of the surprise removed, which isn’t very romantic at all.

Laurie LeBlanc plays Jason and Phoebe’s agent even louder than written, as if she were in the kind of Broadway house Jason and Phoebe write for. The Westminster requires more intimacy, just as it requires much more subdued lighting than Dave Sharp’s harsh design.

Jason’s townhouse, designed by Conny Perry, fits into a community-theater budget, but it’s not a manor purchased with Broadway fame.

* “Romantic Comedy,” Westminster Community Theatre, 7272 Maple St., Westminster. Fridays-Saturdays, 8:30 p.m.; matinee June 6, 2 p.m. Ends June 12. $7-$9. (714) 527-8463. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

Don Myers: Jason Carmichael

Laurie LeBlanc: Blanche Dailey

Sydney Thorton-Smith: Phoebe Craddock

Melinda Parker: Allison St. James

Kevin O’Loane: Leo Janowitz

Danielle Bourgon: Kate Mallory

A Westminster Community Theatre production. Written by Bernard Slade. Directed by Lee Clark. Set: Conny Perry. Lights: Dave Sharp. Production stage manager: Joann Urban.