AT SOUTH COAST REPERTORY : ‘CHARLEY BACON’ DANCES TOO LONG

A Manhattan banker sheds his inhibitions and most of his clothes, reaches into his ethnic roots, and becomes a dancer. It might make a great human interest story. But it doesn’t make much of a play, at least not in Arthur Giron’s “Charley Bacon and His Family,” at South Coast Repertory.

If we’re going to be thrilled by a character’s emergence from a shell, we must see the shell. That’s the problem with “Charley Bacon”--the title character has no inhibitions to shed, no shell to shuck.

We first see Charley (Tony Plana) at age 14, delivering papers while shimmying to a Latin beat. He lives in Hollywood, where his parents were once crowned the king and queen of the extras. His mother (Sally Kemp) is an exotic redhead who worships Carmen Miranda. Her credo: “Dancing is the only way to get through life.” But Charley’s father appears to have lost the beat.

We never meet the old man, for he dies soon after the play begins. Suicide is implied. One might expect this event to give Charley pause. But he barely blinks.

Nothing else seems to faze Charley, either. Not Uncle Harvey’s sexual overtures, nor the fierce disapproval of Charley’s girl friend’s family. He just keeps flashing his “million-dollar smile” and doing his own thing.

And what a free spirit he is. Because his family needs a steady income, Charley decides to enter the unlikely profession of banking. Yet during his interview at the Bank of America, he giggles and talks mainly about dance, even comparing the Bank of America to the Imperial Russian Ballet.

The interviewer is an old grouch who doesn’t understand poor Charley. But does this hold him back? Was Molly Brown sinkable?

A program note acknowledges that Giron’s play is heavily autobiographical. If so, Giron has fallen into a trap that frequently snags playwrights writing about themselves: He takes his central character off the hook much too easily. Giron plants obstacles in Charley’s path only so we can marvel at how skillfully he overcomes them. This sunny-side-up outlook dries up the possibility of real dramatic conflict.

Nor does it appear that director Martin Benson has asked actor Plana to tone down Charley’s effervescence. It’s hard to appreciate the gravity of Charley’s setbacks or to delight in his eventual triumph when he never stops bouncing around the stage.

This becomes especially trying in the second act, when Charley achieves some success as a banker but secretly yearns to dance. When Charley’s wife (Victoria Hoffman) suspects that his proclivities are becoming too obvious and cautions him to keep up his guard, he responds with the claim that “I keep my guard up all day.” Yet the audience simply has to take his word for this, for we never see him doing so.

In fact, we never see him in the bank at all. We catch a glimpse of his boss, but it’s a glimpse that’s designed to make Charley’s adversaries look as retrograde and First World as possible. “Welcome to the old-boy network,” snarls the boss, as he tries to teach Charley to box and swear. This is supposed to be an illuminating contrast to the Third World mysticism of Charley’s dance teacher (Ismael Carlo), but it comes off as a ludicrously loaded deck.

When Charley finally bares his soul, dancing in the plaza in front of his bank, Giron and Benson seem to go out of their way to deflate the drama. Because no one else is on stage, we don’t feel the sense of a public spectacle. And then, when it’s over, has Charley really sacrificed anything in order to make his statement? Not with Giron on guard, always ready to pull his character back to safety.

The actors are more or less helpless in the face of this underwritten play, with its overwritten lines. John C. Moskoff gets a few laughs as Charley’s lecherous Uncle Harvey, but Hoffman doesn’t begin to show us why her character--who wants to join the Army because she’s so devoted to rules and regulations--would ever look twice at a live wire like Charley.

Karl Eigsti’s set is handsome, but I missed the point of the two huge, overlapping picture frames at the back of the stage. Proscenium arches, perhaps, designed to emphasize the theatricality of Charley’s life? At least they added a note of mystery to an evening that is otherwise too spelled out.

‘CHARLEY BACON AND HIS FAMILY’

A play by Arthur Giron at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Director Martin Benson. Sets by Karl Eigsti. Costumes by Susan Denison Geller. Lighting by Peter Maradudin. Choreography by Miguel Delgado. Sound by Nathan Wang. Assistant director Jose Cruz Gonzalez. Dramaturge John Glore. Production manager Paul Hammond. Stage manager Julie Haber. Cast: Tony Plana, Sally Kemp, Victoria Hoffman, Art Koustik, John C. Moskoff, Ismael (East) Carlo.

Performances run Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30. Ends May 10. $17-24. (714) 957-4033.