TWO-CHARACTER PLAY IN BURBANK : ‘CHEKHOV’: FAMILIAR AND FUNNY

You’ve seen this opening scene before? Man in the park meets woman in the park? Of course you have.

Something about John Ford Noonan’s “Talking Things Over With Chekhov,” which opened Thursday at Burbank’s Victory Theatre, is also strongly reminiscent of Kevin Wade’s “Key Exchange.” Probably the park. Only this play has two characters instead of three and no bicycles. These two bimbos are joggers.

Well, they jog. It’s one way of bringing them together in New York’s Riverside Park, at least in Scene 1. They also turn out to be stormy ex-lovers who parted acrimoniously and are only semi-thrilled to see each other again. Sound familiar?

And yet the sense of deja vu more or less stops there. Marlene (Karen Austin) and Jeremy (David Clennon) develop distinctive personalities in this funny, formulaic two-character piece by Noonan. And if the repeated meetings in Riverside Park are as artificial a tactic as the motel in Bernard Slade’s “Same Time, Next Year,” it’s not long before we discover that the characters are at the very least entertaining.

They’re also highly theatrical. Marlene is a Tony-nominated actress who gave it all up after she was badgered into a 71-day mental collapse by a sadistic director at the Williamstown Playhouse (if Noonan had someone in mind here, he never tells). She’s now living with Herbert, a wealthy businessman, who sounds like the perfect prig. They plan to be married.

Jeremy, on the other hand, has become a first-time playwright since they last met--skinnier, messier, neurotic and vaguely unshaven. Can you guess what his first play’s about? You bet: He’s chronicled his relationship with Marlene--the whole disaster. Guess who loves it? Marlene. It’s the perfect vehicle for her comeback, she decides. And guess who wants to produce it? You guessed it. Herbert.

Don’t let the stock elements of the situation fool you. If the plot is often predictable (though it has its share of curves), there’s gold in them thar characters, particularly as embodied by Austin and Clennon--she as a glamorous, likable bitch-goddess; he as a Woody Allenish nervous wreck; both of them full of combustible frailties. But the fillip, the element that lifts this comedy out of the dinner theater circuit by several inches, is Jeremy’s new-found connection with Anton Chekhov. Chekhov, it seems, has moved in with him. Like it or not, real or hallucinatory, this character is teaching him how to write plays--and how to not.

This aspect of things accounts for Noonan’s best writing--tasty, muscular and oddly true to what one imagines Chekhov might say. I know that nobody knows what Chekhov might say, but, as indefensible as the proposition is, trust me: It works. In addition, now and again, Noonan comes up with memorable one-liners. “Hate like ours is special ,” Marlene shouts to Jeremy in her determined effort to wring rewrites out of him. And elsewhere: “My father always told me: ‘Marlene, you can be happy or you can be remembered.’ ”

Nice stuff, with the decided ring of comic intuition, well spoken by actors--both of them-- who know what they’re doing and whom they’re supposed to be. Some of this knowledge may also have come from director Maria Gobetti, who has staged this exchange in six scenes with a bounce that is never confused with flippancy. Noonan may specialize in two-character pieces (note “A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking”), but he does take the trouble to really get to know them.

Designer Meg Gilbert has put Austin in a stylish succession of outfits and Clennon in a succession of . . . let’s say, appropriately telling costumes. The park setting and lighting by D. Martyn Bookwalter--a bench and stone walls--are real enough to attend to leaves that adhere to a smashing black suit worn by Austin. If this was unintentional, keep it in.

Performances at 3326 Victory Blvd. in Burbank run Thursdays through Fridays, 8 p.m., Sundays 7 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $12.50 (818-843-9253).