STAGE REVIEW : ‘SUITE’ MIXES WITH SOUR TO BAT .500

Director Stewart Rogers has four opportunities to score in Golden West College’s production of “California Suite,” Neil Simon’s good-natured complaint against the L.A. life style. He hits on two.

“Suite,” said to be inspired by Simon’s unsuccessful attempt to move from New York to Los Angeles, is really four comedies in one. The only link is the Beverly Hills Hotel, which serves as the setting for the separate playlets about faraway visitors struggling with themselves amid the lush, often idiosyncratic and, at least to Simon’s thinking, relatively culture-less California scene.

Easily the best of these (both as written by Simon and staged by Rogers) is the third, which takes us into suites 203 and 204 to watch Diane and Sidney Nichols engage in sanguinary marital warfare following actress Diane’s losing bid for an Oscar.

Laura Mitchell, with her rich, consistent British accent and subtle body English, delivers a first-rate performance. Her Diane is a hilarious construction: part bitch, part classy dame, part clown.

Mitchell also makes Diane a rather charming lush by letting just enough of her high-born dignity shine through the disheveled appearance and tipsy tilting.

Michael Greenie is just as good as bisexual Sidney, her slightly pompous, thoroughly sardonic and rather likable husband. Without resorting to cliched prancing, Greenie communicates Sidney’s two-sided sexuality with grace and wit.

In the second segment, about a lot of silliness between a Philadelphia man, a drunken hooker and the man’s wife, Rogers goes for the groin and comes up with some effective slapstick.

It’s a little like a Keystone Kops comedy as the husband (Jon Cianci) lopes around the room trying to keep his spouse (Janet Schwartz) from stumbling upon the sleeping tart sequestered in the bedroom. Much of the credit for the bit’s success goes to Cianci, a rubber-faced actor who understands comic timing and physical humor.

The failure of the first playlet, involving an acidic Manhattan urbanite battling her transplanted ex over custody of their daughter, can be traced more to the performances than anything else. Both Lynn McAlister as Hannah and Sam Pericone as William seem self-conscious, which renders their characters hollow and uninvolving.

Rogers once again uses a broad approach in the last segment, but it falls flat from the beginning. This episode of dueling couples stuck with each other on a West Coast vacation is just too loud and brutal for its own good. Everything goes too far (one choking scene involving the husbands must last 10 minutes), and the acting is single-pitched at the hysterical level.

‘CALIFORNIA SUITE’ A Golden West College theater arts department production of the Neil Simon play. Directed by Stewart Rogers. With Lynn McAlister, Sam Pericone, Jon Cianci, Janet Schwartz, Michael Greenie, Laura Mitchell, Kelly Flynn, Sharon Shevidy, Mike Donegan and Stacy Bryan. Sets Steven W. Craig. Lighting Bill Liotta. Costumes Mary Simpson. Plays Saturday and July 17 and 19 at 8:30 p.m. at the campus’ outdoor Patio Theater at 15744 Golden West St. in Huntington Beach. Tickets: $5 and $4. (714) 895-8379.