STAGE REVIEW : THIS ‘TALKIE’ TURNS TO THE FUTURE

Without the sophisticated technology available to movie makers, the theater is hard put when it comes to presenting science fiction. It doesn’t suffice for the stage to be decked out with a lot of gadgetry; what’s on it has to get into our heads.

It’s one thing therefore for Frederick Bailey’s “Walkie Talkie” at Theatre/Theater to be burdened by a junky set that gets in everyone’s way--no one expects “Star Wars” technology in an Equity Waiver production; but it’s another matter when the play’s writing and acting are so poorly executed that we’re quickly disengaged from what’s transpiring before us.

“Walkie Talkie” is a mess. The program notes clue us to its confusion from the start when Bailey describes the play as “a science-fiction farce, a kind of metaphysical melodrama . . . a murder mystery set in the 23rd Century in a gigantic underground city called the Nexus, ruled by an overclass of research scientists.”

If Bailey as playwright has his theatrical forms so mixed up in conception, you can be sure that Bailey as director will present us with even more of a muddle on stage. The acting alone is a clue. When actors spend a lot of time shouting, as they do here, you can bet they feel out of touch with the sense of what they’re trying to play. And when actors shout a lot in comedy (the word farce here is a misnomer), you can bet they don’t trust their material’s intrinsic merit.

It’s hard to tell how well “Walkie Talkie’s” attractive young (or young-ish) 10-member cast might have done had it been pressed into an ensemble, and if William B. Steis’s set didn’t have it so hemmed in. William Utay would have been a great deal more effective as the prototypal mad scientist Dr. Gaffney, for example, if he had played Bailey’s text for its intended irony instead of for heavy punchlines. But many of those lines are self-conscious to begin with, and the cast serves them up as though it were having all the fun instead of sharing it.

“Walkie Talkie” offers the baleful reminder that when an Equity theater production is bad, we see bad theater; when an Equity Waiver production is bad, we see little theater.

Performances Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., at 1713 N. Cahuenga Blvd. (850-6941). Runs indefinitely.