STAGE REVIEWS : BREA CENTER’S ‘MASH’--FUNNY BUT UNFOCUSED

Don’t expect any new insights on war or the human condition from the stage version of “MASH.” The antics of Hawkeye, Trapper John, Hot Lips, et al. are stretched--thinly, very thinly--into a comedy presented by the Brea Theatre League.

While playwright Tim Kelly has remained faithful to the comic spirit of the original source, the script flaps and flounders aimlessly, never finding a focus.

It lacks a dramatic conflict that would fuse the comic bits and pieces into a cohesive whole with a story to tell. Will Hawkeye get a Section 8 discharge? Will Ho-Jon get to medical school in Maine? Will Hot Lips get Hawkeye court-martialed? Will Capt. Waldowski snap out of his depression? Will the gridiron star be transferred to the MASH unit in time for the big football game? On stage, these plot lines don’t add up to anything more than a series of skits.

The success of the television series, for all its zany humor, lay in its bittersweet comment on the endurance of the human spirit under the dehumanizing conditions of war. The enemies were boredom, small minds and the petty rules and regulations of military life. There were also reminders of the numbing hours of overwork spent patching up shattered bodies, only to see them sent back to the front.

Often, it was gallows humor, and it almost always had bite. But there is little indication of those frustrations in this toothless version. The early scenes work determinedly at establishing already familiar characterizations, and the remaining scenes leapfrog from comic situation to comic situation with little to connect them beyond Hawkeye Pierce’s arrival in the MASH unit and his eventual discharge. Much of the second act is devoted to jokes at the expense of a cloying trio of hapless USO tap-dancers. Sure, they’re funny, but the segment plays like a vaudeville routine rather than part of a story being told.

Only in a small subplot is there a glimpse of a human story behind the high jinks and the wisecracks. Ho-Jon, played with quiet dignity by Liem Whately, is a Korean soldier who aspires to medical school against all odds. Across an ocean and a sea of bureaucracy is a caring college dean (nicely played by Suzanne Chapman) who bends the rules to admit him.

The irony is that this production has been staged with good attention to detail on a big, complex and very evocative set. Little details provide their own comment on Army life: Burns carries his own private roll of paper with him to the latrine, and inflated surgical gloves substitute for party balloons at the company dance.

The pace and timing are very deliberate, often missing the spontaneous edge that would sell this manic brand of humor. But, wisely, the performances stay away from derivative carbons of the familiar TV personas. Eric Halasz as Pierce, Stu Cahn as Trapper John and Rich Hunnel as the depressed Waldowski are all likable, and Gregory Brown makes a convincing stuffed shirt of Frank Burns.