STAGE REVIEW : ‘Weehawken’ a Bumpy Ride Toward Passion

Call your play “Weehawken” and immediately you’ve got us thinking: sitcom. Yvonne Wilder’s play at the Tiffany tries to take us through sitcom to something like tragedy. But it’s a jerky ride.

Wilder subtitles her story “passionate comedy.” Meaning that it’s about sex. But until the second half, it’s precisely passion that’s lacking--on the author’s part.

Earlier, we see that Wilder’s heroine (Jennifer Bassey), a sometime actress with a nice little place across the river from Manhattan, has trouble holding onto a man.

And we see that her noisy married sister (Edith Fields) has to keep shlepping in from the country to hold her hand every time a new relationship goes splat. Boo-hoo. There, there. I told you so.

As staged by Jack Colvin, these scenes go after the same kind of laughs as the lasagna scenes between the sister and her husband (Bruce Kirby.) And the opening night audience loyally supplied them.

But at intermission, “Weehawken” does not seem to be a play with very much on its mind.

After intermission, things get a lot more interesting. The actress marries the man of her dreams, a terrifically attractive older guy (Paul Mantee)--and he walks out the door the minute they come home from Atlantic City.

Immature behavior on his part, maybe. But the scene is closely drawn and specifically played, and we see that Wilder is, indeed, concerned for her heroine. What does a woman do when she wants to come close, and the man always wants to run away?

The scene also ends with a legitimate laugh, as opposed to a zinger. “Weehawken” shows flashes of real comic observation, including into the mysteries of a longstanding marriage, as exemplified by the sister and her easy-going husband, not such boobs as they look. (And charmingly played by Fields and Kirby.)

But for everything true in the play, there’s something false. The actress has a cheerful young admirer (Gordon Preston) who takes care of her appointment book and finally confesses, apropos of nothing, that he loves her. Perhaps he is left over from a previous draft of the play. He should be eliminated from the next one.

Also inexplicable is the decision to give the actress a dumb New Joisey accent, a sound that she surely would have taken trouble to lose along the way. (And a sound that our actress, Bassey, clearly doesn’t feel comfortable making.) Since the play wants to contrast the actress’ sophistication with her sister’s suburban squareness, why not let them talk differently?

The device seems to be a crutch to make the character seem colorful and comical. But she isn’t, a discovery we might just as well make early, so that we can start examining her for other qualities. The very last scene, when she opens her door to yet another date, reveals them. “Weehawken” is partly writing--and partly typing.

Plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, at 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Tickets $16.50-$18.50. 8532 Sunset Blvd. (213) 652-6165. ‘WEEHAWKEN’

A “passionate comedy” by Yvonne Wilder at the Tiffany Theatre. Director Jack Colvin. Set John Iacovelli. Lighting Ilya Mindlin. Costume designer Michael Pacciorini. Music Bill Marx. Stage manager Linda Tross. Producers Zachary Kleiman, Charles Lark. With Jennifer Bassey, Edith Fields, Bruce Kirby, Paul Mantee, Gordon Preston.