STAGE REVIEW : A Will and a Fray in the Comical ‘So Long’

Aunt Pearl is laid out in a casket in the family living room, where occasionally one of the gathering mourners lifts the coffin lid with airy detachment and peers at her with curiosity and relief.

It’s a wonderful, droll touch, setting the comical tone for the West Coast premiere of Sandra Deer’s “So Long on Lonely Street” at International City Theatre in Long Beach. Deer has ripened the hoary tradition of the reading-of-the-will drama with dripping Southern Gothic excess--in this case greed, incest and dark family secrets.

The zany unraveling of Aunt Pearl’s will among the members of an acrimonious Southern clan on what’s left of an antebellum estate in Georgia is staged with marvelous aplomb by Shashin Desai. A strong cast, headed by Ron Boussom and Holgie Forrester as a hilariously avaricious couple, delivers an energy so bright that even the play’s looming flaw is forgivable.

That misstep, in a play that opened in Atlanta four years ago (followed by a seven-week run on Broadway in 1986), concerns a twin brother and sister incest theme brazenly played for poignancy. In the context of a romp, that’s courting lunacy. But David Head and Ann Walker portray the latent lovers with such sublime discretion, and the events surrounding them are so risible, that you hardly mind this egregious tribute to Gothic romance.

The play is something like “Little Foxes” meets “Daddy’s Dyin’--Who’s Got the Will?” complete with a whiff of Faulkner’s Snopes family and an aging, imposing housekeeper who has reason to throw her weight around (a salty performance by Patricia Belcher).

Boussom and Forrester are terrific. He plays a blustering yahoo who wants to turn the family estate into a mall called Beulahland for Christian merchants, and she’s his hugely pregnant Southern princess in frilly laces, gliding about looking like a tethered balloon. This pair has so totally absorbed technique that their acting is aerodynamic.

When the goldilocked Forrester overhears that the black housekeeper almost certainly comes from the same lineage that spawned her righteous husband, her instinctive reaction is the production’s most uproarious moment.

The cast is ably balanced by Head’s bemused, fading soap opera actor and Walker’s cynical poet, who derides the family roots. Michael Sollenberger lends solid support as the lawyer handling the will with stolid decorum.

This family whirligig, in an atmosphere redolent of delicate neglect, unspools in a vaguely raggedy, staircased living room and front porch set designed with an imaginative whoop by Don Gruber.

From a certain angle, you can catch old Aunt Pearl in the coffin. Paulie Jenkins’ tonal lighting, Deborah Slate’s costumes, Chuck Estes’ original music and Mario Mariotta’s rain and lightning effect catch a manse under zany siege.

At 4901 E. Carson St. (near the northeast corner of Long Beach City College), Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., through June 11. Tickets: $10. (213) 420-4128.