STAGE REVIEW : Rothman’s ‘Excess Baggage’ Full of Promise

Mark Rothman isn’t the first TV sitcom writer to try his hand at theater, but few score such a promising stage debut as playwright-director Rothman achieves with “Excess Baggage” at the Cast at the Circle Theatre.

Rothman, who has been a TV producer-writer for 16 years (“Laverne and Shirley,” “Happy Days”), has fashioned a tasty comedy centered on embattled adult siblings whose screwball lives unfold though encounters in assorted airport VIP lounges.

This world premiere and visiting production at the Cast doesn’t totally disguise Rothman’s TV origins (structurally, the play’s action moves through eight evenly-timed short scenes, and some stereotyped characters dot the supporting cast). But happily the play’s humor comes out of character.

The dialogue caroms between pungency and frequent hilarity. And the lead characters are genuinely different people at the end of the romp. “Excess Baggage” is an audience-pleaser that rarely insults, and seems destined for theatrical life elsewhere.

You’re experiencing a relationship comedy through a telescope outfitted with a wide lens. The sibling tension expands to include parents, spouses and lovers. The show’s blowups, among a pictorial 10-member cast, are expressive urban portraits created by Larry Miller and Kathleen Clark as the estranged brother and sister.

The vivid Miller plays an acerbic Slap Maxwell kind of character, a baseball broadcaster--as he puts it, the station’s “No. 1 play-by-play man on the No. 2 backup game”--demoted to covering soccer, a game he hates. As his self-deceiving sister, Clark is an adulterous ball of nerves bouncing between husband and lover (nice turns by Michael Fosberg and George Solomon).

The linchpin for all this is airport lounges in Florida and environs. There the characters, two or three or four at a time, are hurtled together in the course of their appointed rounds. The last round, featuring a physically uproarious, two-woman battle royal over a dead mother’s wedding ring, is deliciously staged by Rothman and acted with a whoop by Clark (a Terri Garr look-alike).

Christa Bartels’ VIP lounge design is artful. Dana Kathryn Silver’s costumes are unfussy. And Jon Gottlieb’s sound design includes torchy musical bridges, some ironic on the subject of excess baggage, human and otherwise, i.e., Billie Holliday singing, “I’m traveling light. . . .”

Performances are at 800 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 and 7 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $15-$17.50. (213) 462-0265.