‘See How They Run’ Play Into the Ground

After 18 years staging shows in the community room at Turtle Rock Community Park, Irvine Community Theatre will go dark while looking for a new venue. The company’s choice of Philip King’s “See How They Run” seems, at first glance, the proper farewell production.

For more than half a century, this farce has been a staple at community theaters--one rarely shown in its best light. Farce, particularly British like this, is a delicate thing that can fall at the first leaden misstep.

It never even gets much of a chance to rise in this staging, under Marc LeBlanc’s wooden, haphazard direction. A great deal of it is directed as though it were Ibsen, with little thought to tight comic tempos that make farce work, particularly those delicate runs of freewheeling dialogue that should be gossamer, but here sound like speeches from a B-movie.

The action takes place after World War II in the living room of the vicarage of the Rev. Lionel Toop and his American wife, Penelope, a former actress. Penelope’s local nemesis, the tight-lipped Miss Skillon, is--as usual--hounding Lionel about the libertine image of his wife; Penelope’s uncle, the Bishop of Lax, is expected for a visit.

Lionel is off to a public appearance, and Penelope receives a surprise visit from an old actor friend, Clive Winton, now in the army. They decide to go to the theater, but the location is off-limits for Clive, so Penelope dresses him in Lionel’s other suit, turned collar and all. It’s a perfect set-up for a rollicking evening full of mistaken identities, slamming doors and the naive supposition of sexual misdeeds.

This all has to be treated with dead seriousness to be funny. The director--and too much of his cast--make the fatal error of trying to be funny. Heading the list is Cheryl Dunlap, who overplays as the maid Ida and whose costume is something that might have been worn by the Grand Ole Opry’s Minnie Pearl. Her phony Cockney accent is full of screeches and caterwauls.

Valerie Sparks tries hard as Penelope to maintain the restraint necessary for this genre, as does Leslie Williams as Miss Skillon, and both would look better in a better production.

So would Dan Henry as Lionel, Edward J. Steneck as the stuffy Bishop and, especially, Gil Peters as the Intruder, an escaped Russian from a nearby military base. They lack only direction.

Ron McCoy, as Penelope’s friend, is colorless, and Rip Delisanti overplays Sergeant Towers, but not as badly as Dunlap. George Pelham fidgets a lot and looks lost.

BE THERE

“See How They Run,” Irvine Community Theatre, Turtle Rock Community Park. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. $10. Ends Aug. 15. (949) 857-5496. Running time: 2 hours.