STAGE REVIEW : ‘End of the World’ Unravels in Santa Ana

“End of the World” is a prepossessing title for one of Arthur Kopit’s more unprepossessing plays.

It sounded even more prepossesing early on, when the title read “End of the World With Symposium to Follow.” The story goes that Kopit dropped the symposium part when too many people apparently took it literally and stayed away from the show.

Perhaps they knew something else, because beyond the title lies an aborted play. Kopit took on a monumental subject (nuclear holocaust), went at it through a difficult theatrical conceit (a tricky game of mirrors) and struck out.

“End of the World’s” shortcomings loom even larger at the Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana, where it opened over the weekend and where it lies limp as a marinated mushroom in the hands of actors and a director who don’t have a clue what to do with it.

Using the personas of Michael Trent (Greg Atkins), a playwright with delusions of being Philip Marlowe, and that of Philip Stone (Ralph Richmond), a mystery mogul who, for reasons he won’t divulge, hires Trent to write a doomsday play, Kopit sets out to demonstrate how preposterous it is to talk of creating weapons to prevent a war. Or to rationalize the irrational.

But setting out to do something and doing it are two different things.

Not only does the play become mired in the massiveness of its own ambition, it doesn’t even try very hard to escape the pitfalls.

Even as Stone charges Trent to write this play, we collide head on with the satire’s faulty mechanism: a failed marriage of form and content. The form is whimsical spoof; the content philosophical diatribe. Oil and vinegar.

Kopit cheats. He hangs his anti-nuclear discourses on the flimsiest of pretexts. We have many conversations that dance on the head of a pin. Trent tells us he can’t write this play, but never tells us why he can’t. His agent, bafflingly named Audrey Wood (after the real-life agent who represented Tennessee Williams for many years) speaks in short non-sentences. So does Stone. So does Trent. And no one comes to grips with anything.

Kopit’s playwright is a transparent alter ego and Kopit’s play a case of Chinese nesting boxes where the fiction you watch is a spin-off of the reality you live in: a play about writing a play. But it is both guileless and artless. Elements are introduced and abandoned, dialogue is overwrought or underdone and situations repeatedly are left dangling.

Example: Stone several times in the opening scene insists that Trent should name his price. Trent, who needs the money, never does. Trent tells us he doesn’t have a secretary, then proceeds to invent one. He also tells us he’s keeping his wife and kid out of this play, but they keep defying him and showing up in Act III. These are intended as funnies. They don’t work.

Minor mischief, perhaps, but the kind that shows great dramaturgical sloppiness. The third act is almost entirely a case of telling instead of showing.

No wonder the play unravels.

At the Alternative Rep, it never comes together. Director Joel T. Cotter seems stumped and deals with a heavy hand where a light one is needed. Transitions are slow, speechifying is ponderous and the comedy lies as cold as yesterday’s leftovers on the plate.

Richmond has enough presence and enigma to make the character of Stone work, but Atkins is undone by his Marlowe-esque gumshoe playwright. All laughter is forced.

As Audrey Wood, Suzanne Chapman offers a smiling face as context for the tentative blandishments that are Kopit’s substitute for dialogue. Michele Roberge as a Soviet specialist goes for kooky hysteria, but only F. Thom Spadaro as the squirming Gen. Wilmer, a man with a terminal case of wild-eyed Pentagonese, has a grip on the extreme style this play demands. (He’s equally snappy in a couple of other cameo roles.)

This company has been praised for attempting difficult plays under limited conditions. Judging from the reviews, it has done so with mixed but encouraging results.

Kopit’s piece may not be the greatest thing since “Dr. Strangelove,” but neither is this company able to distill what’s good in it. The lapse makes for a double whammy.

At 1636 S. Grand Ave. in Santa Ana, Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m., until Dec. 18. Tickets: $10; (714) 836-7929. The show reopens Jan. 5-21.