AT THE AHMANSON : ‘BEST MAN’ OFFERS SUMMER STOCK AT WINTER PRICES

Gore Vidal is said to have hit the roof after seeing a run-through of “The Best Man” at the Ahmanson last week. Rightly so. This is as perfunctory a production as that theater has ever harbored: summer stock at winter prices.

But that doesn’t let Vidal off the hook. He had the chance to do something interesting and useful with this revival, and he blew it.

To review: “The Best Man” was a 1960 political comedy with 1950s concerns, such as: Should an egghead try to run for President? Faced with a smear campaign, does a candidate take the high road or the low road?

It might be possible to revive the play as a period piece, trusting the audience to read it in the light of recent headlines about Gary Hart and Joe Biden. Has the American political process grown more cynical or less so since 1960?

Alternately--and this would have been worth doing--Vidal could have kept the old title and built a new play under it, one that would truly reflect what it takes to procure a presidential nomination in the late 1980s: for example, an understanding that “the press” has now become “the media.”

Though the viewer wouldn’t know it at the Ahmanson, actual political reporters now invade the candidate’s suite with minicams as well as little notebooks. The best man these days is the one who can best encapsulate his message into a 15-second bite for the network news.

Vidal, an old Washington hand and a media star himself, knows the process as well as anybody, and is presumably troubled by it. But he is not about to invest a lot of time in rethinking a piece that always was a bit of a potboiler, for an L.A. production that might go nowhere.

Instead, Vidal has done a quick patch job on “The Best Man.” A repatch job, actually. For a 1976 revival he threw out the Eisenhower jokes and put in some Gerald Ford jokes. Now he replaces the Ford jokes with George Bush jokes, and asks us to believe that we’re at the 1988 convention.

But underneath it’s still 1960, where the good guy is an aloof ironist from Harvard who knows that there are no easy answers (Mel Ferrer, vaguely evoking Henry Fonda) and the bad guy is an unprincipled opportunist from nowhere who came up through the ranks by ruining other people’s political careers (Don Murray, vaguely suggesting, of all people, Gene Kelly).

The result is an evening in a time warp--a play that neither tells it like it is, nor tells it like it was. No wonder Jose Ferrer’s actors, including Hope Lange as Mel Ferrer’s wife, seem to be reading their lines off cue cards. (Buddy Ebsen as the old President hardly bothers to do that.) They don’t believe it either.

Lynne Thigpen has a different problem as Mrs. Gamadge. Here Vidal does show some interest in reshaping an important character. Originally Mrs. G. was a WASP monster-lady who spoke out forthrightly for the kind of man that “we Women” (capital W) wanted to see in the White House: a homey hubby who helps his nice little wife do the dishes and doesn’t read too many books.

Sensing the need for an update, Vidal now presents Mrs. G. as a sassy black ex-token anchorperson--who still has to take the Gamadge line in the crunch, or the plot falls apart. The only way to get away with this is to present her as a total cynic, which Thigpen sensibly does. But Vidal hasn’t given her enough lines to justify this, and the viewer can’t imagine what this go-ahead woman is doing enforcing the political wisdom of the 1950s.

Nor can we imagine what she’s talking about when she notes that “Nancy did Ron a lot of harm by not campaigning with him.” At times Vidal seems to be sprinkling in real Washington names so that the audience can give a knowledgeable little laugh, without the line’s actually making a point.

Well, I never promised you a rose garden--as Fritz said to Joan. But for a “world-class theater” (to quote the Ahmanson program), this show is hard to believe. You can be sure, though, that the ushers wear cute little straw hats with red-white-and-blue bands, and that they hand you a BEST MAN campaign button on the way in. Packaging: It’s how we sell everything these days.

P.S. The set is by Douglas Schmidt, and as the audience files into the house, it suggests a cheesy little road-company set huddled on a stage that can’t afford a curtain. It warms up under Martin Aronstein’s lights, but we never quite recover from that bleak first impression. This is not much of a start to the Martin Manulis era at the Ahmanson.

‘THE BEST MAN’ Gore Vidal’s play, presented by Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre. Director Jose Ferrer. Sets Douglas W. Schmidt. Costumes Madeline Ann Graneto. Lighting Martin Aronstein. With Paul Tulley, Michael Fox, Mel Ferrer, Edson Stroll, Luise Heath, Hope Lange, Brian Avery, Lynne Thigpen, Kerry Slattery, Buddy Ebsen, Lois Chiles, Christopher Murray, Don Murray, Charles McDaniel, Ryan MacDonald, Frederic Cook. Plays at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, with 2 p.m. matinees Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets $14-$35. Closes Nov. 29. (213) 410-1062 or (714) 972-7358.