STAGE REVIEW : ‘SANG’ SINGS SONG OF THE HOME FRONT

“And a Nightingale Sang,” at the Santa Monica Playhouse, is “You Can’t Take It With You,” with buzz bombs. A British family sticks together during World War Two II: Ma on her knees before the Blessed Mother, Da trying to figure out the chords for the latest American pop tune, Grandpa carrying on about nothing and the girls mooning about their love lives.

This isn’t pluck; it’s self-absorption. Had C.P. Taylor’s comedy been written in the 1940s, it would have had to include at least two speeches about What We’re Fighting For. Since it was written in the 1970s, it can acknowledge the fact that most people are too preoccupied most of the time with their own private dramas to pay more than lip service to national crises.

Perhaps one day we’ll simply tell the war makers to buzz off--we’ve got our own problems. Not until modern life gets more interesting, though. The play makes it clear that war does enhance our private dramas, particularly in the case of young people. Much the finest part of Taylor’s story concerns the love affair between the shy Helen (Virginia Lantry) and a nice-enough young soldier who turns out to have a wife and child in another town (Kyle Secor).

Helen, being slightly lame, never thought to have a man. She goes into this relationship with a certain gratitude, pursues it with her eyes wide open and comes out of it not too damaged--indeed, with a new sense of her place in the world. There’s some lovely writing here, and both Lantry and Secor make you feel the innocence of these two young people without transcending them into Romeo and Juliet.

Unfortunately, “And a Nightingale Sang” not only wants to be a poignant memory of love on the home front in the 1940s, it wants to get laughs. And it will do anything to get them. The scenes in the Stotts’ parlor, which designer Robert W. Zentis doesn’t distinguish clearly enough from the adjoining bedroom, smack of bad British sitcom, with everybody hammering away at his or her pet eccentricity and nobody listening to a word that anyone else says.

This is Sunday-paper cartooning and director Mark W. Travis only encourages it, at the expense of a cast who probably could have found more than one note to play in these characters, had permission been given.

Dianne Turley Travis as Mama, for example. She falls to her knees before the BVM as automatically as Fibber McGee (to invoke a period reference) yanking open his closet. Not once are we allowed to feel there might be a poignancy here too. She’s a wind-up toy, as is Robert Farthing as her soldier son-in-law, strutting around the parlor with his chest out.

The condescension is probably written into the script, but it would have been nice if an American company could have mitigated it. American actors are very good at being zany in family comedy without being cheap (see the Kennedy Center’s recent revival of “You Can’t Take It With You”).

“And a Nightingale Sang” in Santa Monica needs fewer characters and more people.

The cast includes Bill DeLand, Talia Balsam and Thomas H. Middleton, and the period costumes by Gina Maria Piazza are excellent. It plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, at 7 p.m. Sundays, at 1211 Fourth Street, Santa Monica. Information: (213) 394-9779.