STAGE REVIEW : WATERED-DOWN FLAVOR IN A SHAKY ‘PINK LADY’

Some people have cancer; some are alcoholics. In that sense, you might call Laura Olsher’s and Anne Taylor’s “The Pink Lady” at the Megaw Theatre another disease play.

It’s been a long time since Neil Simon’s “The Gingerbread Lady” wryly made us feel the despair that drives people to drink. Olsher and Taylor take another tack in their stage adaptation of Olsher’s novel: They suggest that it’s not despair that drives people to drink, but drink that drives people to despair.

The proposition is acceptable. What it needs is more dramatic interest. A stronger director and a better supporting cast would also help, because Scott Reiniger has staged this Megaw version perfunctorily at best, without much visible assistance to the actors in nailing down their characters.

“Pink Lady’s” central figure is Sarah Morgan (Camilla Carr), a successful writer of television soaps who’s living through a soap opera of her own. She’s divorced, living alone and having an affair with Paul (Larry Marko), a calculating actor who keeps her at arm’s length--but on a handy string.

Her college-age son Jason (Jeff Bennett) is her joy; her story editor Merrily (Susan Davis) is her nemesis; her assistant, Rosita (Karla Boos), is her right arm--an arm that eventually knocks her out.

The other character here is the bottle, because Sarah is an alcoholic. When Paul doesn’t call, when Jason decides to spend Christmas with his dad, when Merrily throws her a particularly hard ball, Sarah drinks. When Sarah drinks, Rosita covers up her tracks. She writes the soap for her--all too well.

In time, Sarah drinks more and everyone else cares less, which is what needs to happen if she’s ever going to pick up the pieces of her life and start over. The play’s ending suggests Sarah does start over when she joins Alcoholics Anonymous.

If it sounds too pat, it is. Sarah’s downward slide is as predictable as the promise of her resurrection, however painful. And while Olsher and Taylor have given us a believable Sarah, it’s a Sarah who talks a lot but articulates nothing we haven’t heard before.

And yet the opportunity and the framework for it are there. Now and then, Sarah steps through the fourth wall to address the audience directly. At those moments, she’s free to express anything: her innermost thoughts, significant recollections, past incidents that might illuminate the present.

Instead, the speeches are surprisingly cautious and dry, bordering on the didactic. With a high-pressure job, a cad like Paul and a bimbo like Merrily to deal with, no wonder the stress mounts. But that’s not why Sarah drinks. Sarah’s drinking when the curtain goes up. Even if alcoholism is a physical condition, like the mumps, something usually triggers it. We want to know this woman better--her anguish, her fears, the reasons for the low self-esteem. We need to understand her disconcertment.

Jason and Rosita are characters of flesh and blood, conflicted and ambivalent, and Bennett and Boos, respectively, portray them engagingly--particularly Boos who, in a difficult spot, ends up more friend than foe. But they’re the only two.

Davis’ stiff and dispassionate Merrily is a mouthpiece, a rather nasty stick figure parading around in a succession of bathing suits that are no substitute for rounding out her shallow character. As for Marko’s Paul, he is so one-dimensionally self-centered that it’s hard to accept Sarah’s slavish attachment to this prig.

Olsher and Taylor need to go back to the drawing board with these two. And with Sarah, too. Carr, a talented actress, is rather victimized by a character that goes only part of the distance. Olsher and Taylor took this confessional to a certain point but stopped short of really pulling the stops.

Sets and lights by Tony Potter are strictly basic, which is fine since the production correctly has the feel of a work-in-progress.

Performances at 1760 Saticoy St. in Northridge run Sundays though Tuesdays, 8:30 p.m. until June 23; (818) 881-8166. Tickets: $7.50.