STAGE REVIEW : Flat Characters, Witty Words in Predictable Plot

In “First Night,” the delectable comedy hit at the North Coast Repertory Theatre last season, playwright Jack Neary showed how well he understood how funny and touching true, but unlikely, lovers can be.

In that West Coast premiere for both playwright and play, Neary threw a nun and her former grade school love, a video store manager, together with a twist. The nun was ready to move on with the romance; it was the worldly manager with all the inhibitions.

An odd-couple romance is again the subject of Neary’s “Road Company,” a world premiere at the North Coast Rep, playing through July 24.

This time it is between Theresa, a prim schoolteacher, and Michael, a wild and woolly actor to whom Theresa, to her horror, has inadvertently rented a room.

Unlike the first show, however, this one follows predictable lines, much in the spirit of “The Goodbye Girl” whirled in a blender with “It’s My Turn.”

So, although Theresa and Michael are at each other’s throats in the beginning, it doesn’t take long to figure out that teacher’s old dependable pet (boyfriend) is on the way out, and that fellow brandishing the apple of temptation in his blue jockey briefs is heading in.

Predictability alone does not prove deadly though. A lack of development in the characters does.

It’s a witty script, verdant with funny foliage: “I hate to break this to you,” Theresa’s exasperated soon-to-be-ex says to her, “but you’ve got to start living on the nonfiction shelf.”

But, at 2 1/2 hours, the story is too long to be spritely, despite Olive Blakistone’s energetic direction. It is a charming conceit for Blakistone to cast the lovers of “First Night,” Vinny Ferrelli and Carmen Beaubeaux, as the lovers in “Road Company.” But curiously, not only did the drive inherent in the roles reverse, so did the actors’ grasp of their parts.

Ferrelli, who sometimes seemed at a loss as the emotionally paralyzed manager in “First Night,” punch-punch-punches the jokes like a boxer in the aggressive role of Michael. Conversely, Beaubeaux, who radiated power in her portrayal of a nun with an un-Mother Teresa-type mission, sheds no light on her rather confusing role as the teacher.

Just why is Theresa stuck in her dead grandmother’s house if she feels so stifled by it? Why is she going out with a man she can barely tolerate? Why are she and Michael so attracted to each other?

If Beaubeaux knows, she isn’t letting the audience in on it.

Tim Irving brings too much affectation to the part of the old, solid-as-salt boyfriend. Patricia Di Meo is wonderfully funny as Theresa’s meddlesome neighbor, the self-appointed guardian of the dead grandmother’s wishes. She would have been affecting as well if the playwright had used her less as the butt of everybody’s jokes and more as a person, with her own valid, if admittedly off-center, set of values.

The lighting by Jack Shepherd ushers the long day’s journey into night nicely. Kathryn Gould’s costumes manage to be obvious without plumbing the comic potential. The crickets in Michael Shapiro’s sound design are distractingly loud and he fails to simulate the all-important whoosh of the bat in the figurative belfry of Theresa’s attic.

Leslee Baren’s set should be like a character in itself, standing in for the dead grandmother as she controls the unwilling Theresa’s life in absentia. As it stands, however, it is too airy and bright to merit all of Michael’s jabs about “silver bells and cockleshells and Irish/Catholic paranoia.”

Like the script itself, the set needs a few more drafts.

“ROAD COMPANY”

By Jack Neary. Director is Olive Blakistone. Set by Leslee Baren. Lighting by Jack Shepherd, Sound by Michael Shapiro. Costumes by Kathryn Gould. With Carmen Beaubeaux, Tim Irving, Patricia Di Meo and Vinny Ferrelli. At 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays through July 24. At the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Lomas Santa Fe Plaza, Solana Beach.