THEATER REVIEW:Comedy, drama mix in compelling ‘Wonderland’

Playwrights and screenwriters have created a cottage industry by writing with gleeful malice about their own profession, the most shimmering examples being “Sunset Boulevard,” “All About Eve” and “Deathtrap.”

David Wiener — a playwright born and raised in Irvine — has added his spin on the genre with “System Wonderland,” a compelling mixture of comedy and drama with a Hollywood background.

This play currently is receiving a superbly mounted world premiere just a few miles from the author’s old stamping grounds at South Coast Repertory.

The “Wonderland” is the film capital itself, while the “System” is the process through which potential movie blockbusters are created, and often it’s not a pretty picture.

Wiener, with considerable assistance from director (and SCR co-founder) David Emmes, explores these machinations through the pride, passion and paranoia of his three characters, thrust together ostensibly to bring a new motion picture to fruition.

Jerry Wolf (Robert Desiderio) is a veteran screenwriter, an Oscar winner whose better days are behind him but who yearns to capture the spotlight again. His wife Evelyn (Shannon Cochran) is a still-beautiful and accomplished actress who’s committing the unpardonable Hollywood sin of growing older.

Into their lives comes Aaron (John Sloan), a young, green and initially subservient writing student assigned to help Wolf over the rough spots he’s encountered midway through his latest script.

Aaron, as it turns out, has long been transfixed with Evelyn’s beauty and talent, and tends to view her as she was a decade or two before — not that she’s ventured into Norma Desmond territory by any means.

The glib, hyperkinetic Jerry is constructed to perfection by Desiderio, who maintains a firm grip on the situation even while his character’s hold is slipping.

Cochran enacts her role as something of a paradox, a still-quite lovely woman and an actress of resplendent vitality who’s battling Hollywood perceptions in a quest for elusive glory. Her petulant nature as the developing plot eludes her character is beautifully presented.

The younger writer clearly has his own agenda. Sloan carefully remains deferential, even reverential, through his earlier scenes and reserves his climactic thrust for the proper moment.

All three are in thrall to the ever-omniscient Hollywood “system.”

Myung Hee Cho’s elegant setting — with its flickering old movie images projected on the wall — enriches the production as does Lap-Chi Chu’s lighting design and Tom Cavnar’s sound effects.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “System Wonderland”

WHERE: South Coast Repertory, Julianne Argyros Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

WHEN: Tuesdays through Fridays at 7:45 p.m., Saturdays & Sundays at 2 & 7:45, until May 13

COST: $28 - $60

INFO: (714) 708-5555 or go to www.scr.org