STAGE REVIEW : ‘Grand Junction’ Gets Signals Crisscrossed

With a title like “Grand Junction,” you think of trains, and everything at the Coast Playhouse (where a play of that name opened Sunday) encourages the idea.

The ushers wear engineer overalls and caps as they take your ticket, and before he changed the name not so long ago, Martin Casella’s play was called “The Train Play.” You can’t get more explicit than that.

So, of course, “Grand Junction” is not really about trains as such. The junction in “Grand Junction” is that of overlapping lives--including, indirectly, that of brothers Martin (playwright) and Matt (director) Casella who created this piece for Mean Noises Productions.

The Casellas send some of those lives across the country on trains. Ah, you think. Clever. Not clever enough. It poses complex structural problems that it only half solves.

In the opening act, we witness parallel but unconnected scenes in five sets of Los Angeles lives. These belong to a retiring Compton schoolteacher (Fran Bennett); a promiscuous Beverly Hills divorcee (Deborah Harmon) and her unhappy son (Jay Underwood); an ex-fireman (Peter Frechette) and his aerobics-instructor roommate (Paul Regina); an ambitious corporate secretary (Jennifer Parsons) and her searching boyfriend (Anthony Edwards); a film critic (Lu Leonard) and her gently demented husband (Ian Abercrombie).

A lot goes on between individuals (our lone schoolteacher talks to the off-stage presence of her sister), but never anything to connect one set of lives to another. You can see the problems for playwright and director and the Casellas deserve praise for maintaining coherence in this five-ring circus.

Coherence, yes. Credibility, no. And the strain shows. It’s a potential idea for a spoof of a certain type of ‘40s films with contrived Hollywood endings. The germ of the sendup is there, but it buckles under an agenda of in-jokes and an incomplete search for coalescence.

All playwrights from Shakespeare to Moliere have indulged in skewering pet nemeses, and perhaps a line like “All I can think about is taking a butcher knife to the entire staff at ICM” takes care of somebody’s private fury, but it’s shallow and limits the work. It plays to guffaws in Hollywood. How would it play in Khartoum?

Things perk up in the second act as our travelers reach whatever destination was intended and the lines separating their lives gingerly begin to crisscross. Here “Grand Junction” emulates nothing so much as a Frank Capra comedy, with screwball events (sometimes excellently conceived) multiplying towards an improbable climax.

There is a bittersweet Thanksgiving Day encounter between the conventioneering film critic and an optimistic young woman (Holly Haber)--and another, shallower one between the aerobics instructor and his dying mother (Karen Kondazian). Duelling typewriters lead to love and discovery between the ex-fireman and the Beverly Hills divorcee, while her apprehensive son has a literal nightmare before meeting the father (Colby Chester) he’s not seen in 12 years.

But the topper is a wild moment in a freezing Detroit park between the schoolteacher and her daughter, who’s obsessed with Diana Ross. (Trivia irony-of-the-week is that glamorous Tyra Ferrell, who plays this daughter, is a “Dreamgirls” veteran.)

Good ideas, yes, at times skillfully etched within their tiny two-person orbits, but unable to stretch or survive beyond them. “Grand Junction,” in the end, has more moments that don’t work than it has moments that do, and neither Casella--director or writer--finds a way to resolve them.

It’s as if having come a certain distance, Casella the writer gave up on tying the increasingly loose ends, opting for slapping them together in a giddy and indulgent finale. It’s a careless solution.

A lot of top acting talent breathes more life into this exercise than it properly earns. Harmon can’t overcome the rotten lines she’s given in her early scenes with her son, but improves greatly as the material gets better. Leonard, Abercrombie, Frechette, Bennett and Ferrell occasionally manage something akin to stature by sheer dint of investing their own legitimacy into their sketchy characters. But it’s uphill--all the way.

For all its claim to affirming life, this Mean Noises production can be mean-spirited now and then. Suggesting that certain Third World countries “should be nuclear waste dumps” is remarkable in the light of the recent news that, indeed, many of them have been abused that way. And the moralizing at the end--that there is a plan to our lives and that we should “sit back and let perfection wash over (us)”--is the stuff that Hallmark cards are made of. It takes sterner matter to make a play.

Plays at 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., until Sept. 3. Tickets: $15-$17.50; (213) 650-8507.