STAGE REVIEW : JUST WHERE IS THE LIFE OF THIS ‘PARTY’?

Elliptical, repetitious, comic, suggestively nasty and vaguely menacing. There’s your basic lexicon for the theater of Harold Pinter.

It’s been 28 years since the English playwright wrote his first full-length piece, “The Birthday Party” (known briefly at the start of its career as “The Birthday Play”). How would watching “The Birthday Party” affect us now?

A new production that opened Thursday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center should have given us the chance to find out. It sounded promising. The director was Alan Mandell who, in 1960, with partner Jules Irving (at their San Francisco Actors’ Workshop), gave “Party” and Pinter their first airing in America.

Promises, promises.

What unfurled Thursday was a mess--as tame, unmysterious and untormented a version of this Grand Guignol exercise as one would never hope to see.

The premise Pinter lays out is simple enough: Petey and Meg, a retired couple who live in a shabby house in a remote English seaside town with one boarder, Stanley, are approached by two men who need lodging for the night.

Pinter lets us deduce that the disagreeable Stanley has a few skeletons in his closet, including a rather petulant Oedipal rapport with the slovenly Meg. Pinter also lets us deduce that Stanley is highly disturbed at the prospect of the two strangers boarding with them. We don’t know why, but it’s clear he fears them: the surly McCann and his boss, Goldberg.

In the course of a nocturnal party for Stanley’s birthday (which it may be or not), veiled threats emerge. Small, distinct acts of terrorism occur. Their effect is chillingly confirmed the next morning, though the broad light of day sheds no light at all on a reason for the savagery. End of play.

It is never Pinter’s intent to illuminate, always his intent to infer. “The desire for verification on the part of us all,” he once wrote, “is understandable but cannot always be satisfied. I suggest there can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.”

For this inferential reality to succeed, real terror must be achieved. That’s where Mandell’s staging breaks down most completely. The eerie second act party, the most loaded with heart-stopping possibilities, feels more like a Hallowe’en masquerade. And the third act aftermath, in many ways the stronger crucible for covert, crushing fear, is played politely by the numbers. Would Petey really be as unperturbed by events around him as Basil Langton’s detached performance would have us believe? Not a chance.

Robert Phalen’s Stanley has the shuffling, shifty attributes of the terminally unsound, but even he loses persuasiveness in Act II, where he needs it the most. Most damaging of all, there’s not a trace of menace in the homey suavity of Harold Gould’s Goldberg.

Gould was a late replacement in a role to which he could hardly be less suited. His Goldberg wouldn’t hurt a fly. Even big Colm Meaney, playing the lackey McCann, doesn’t live up to his surname. His fancy footwork, trying to keep Stanley from leaving the house plays more like Woody Allen meets the Hulk.

Everyone here, in fact, is paying lip service to the play instead of believing it and no one more so than Rhonda Aldrich as the flirtatious neighbor Lulu, who’s English accent is as erratic as her credibility. Only Erica Yohn’s Meg seems to sustain a believable consistency, though even she isn’t incapable of dropping the British tones for an occasional Americanism.

Nicole Morin’s costumes are on target and D. Martyn Bookwalter has delivered an appropriately seedy apartment set with odd quirks--such as banister-less stairs, a curious kitchen and two doors to the outside that seem never adequately differentiated.

Kathy A. Perkins’ lights do what they can to make up for the suspense the production fails to create (including leaving an enveloping black exterior despite talk of sunny mornings, so that only when doors are closed do we feel sunlight streaming in). If it’s the right effort it comes from the wrong person.

Director Mandell simply has not managed the play’s primary goal, which is to make us feel panic in a deliberate mix of clarity and confusion, things “one remembers even though they may never have happened.” Instead of this kind of ambiguity, we are left with the resounding thud of boredom.

Performances at 514 S. Spring St. run Mondays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., with Saturday matinees at 2 p.m., until March 22; (213) 627-5599.