THEATER REVIEW:’Nothing Sacred’ uneven

There is little in the first act, or even in its closing moments, to justify South Coast Repertory’s selection of George F. Walker’s “Nothing Sacred” to lead off its new season. But early in the play’s second act, things begin to look up considerably.

Shortly after intermission, and lasting until an ill-conceived dueling scene turns the play south again, “Nothing Sacred” crackles with biting irony and robust character development, almost as though the creation of that segment had been assigned to more imaginative hands.

“Nothing Sacred,” Walker’s adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s classic Russian novel “Fathers and Sons,” is a play of ideas and mind games — and of individual freedom set about the same time, 1859, as our own country was debating the merits of involuntary servitude.

But class struggle is not the most electrifying of topics, even when staged by a master director such as SCR’s Martin Benson.

Benson’s production is dependent on strength of characterization to propel it to a desired level of effectiveness. In this respect, he has some terrific interpretative ammunition, but Walker’s diatribes initially are too subtly muted and ultimately too strident to draw much intellectual blood.

The aforementioned electric post-intermission sequence, however, nearly compensates for this drawback.

The play introduces two land-owning brothers, the democratic Nikolai (Richard Doyle) and the preening Pavel (John Vickery), whose views of society could hardly differ more.

When Nikolai’s son (Daniel Blinkoff) returns from college with his anarchist buddy (Eric D. Steinberg), the fireworks, such as they are, begin to simmer.

Though he’s only present briefly in the first act, Vickery virtually commands the second with a supremely articulate performance, using his foppish mannerisms to worm his way under the skin of Steinberg’s impassioned radical.

In a war of words, however, Steinberg reigns supreme, drawing and quartering opposing views with a rapier wit and razor-edged tongue.

Blinkoff effectively negotiates the choppy waters between traditionalist and nihilist views. Doyle renders the most accessible performance with his painstakingly liberal attitude. Khrystyne Haje impresses as a crafty, wealthy widow who sparks the Vickery-Steinberg unpleasantness.

If the phrase “up yours” can be uttered politely, Hal Landon Jr. would be the actor to deliver it. Landon excels as Doyle’s dried prune of a servant, skewering others with a mannered, self-effacing style.

Angela Goethals does a cutesie turn as Doyle’s comely maid who’s also borne his child, while Jeremy Johnson is a savage field overseer and Jeffrey Marlow is an extraneous visitor with a maddening giggle.

The stark, edge-of-the-forest setting by James Youmans and Jerome Martin serves the production well, as do Angela Balogh Calin’s period costumes. Michael Roth’s original Russian music, sung periodically in that language by the actors, accents the show but lingers past the point of effectiveness.

While “Nothing Sacred” may not completely satisfy the dramatic nor the intellectual palate, there are individual interpretations — such as those of Vickery and Landon — that give the production occasional bite.

And that early second act is well worth the tedious trip through the first.