STAGE REVIEW : Treating Whyte’s ‘Disability’ at the Odyssey Theatre

Audiences tend to go where they are pointed. Since Ron Whyte’s play at the Odyssey is called “Disability: A Comedy,” most of Sunday night’s crowd was happy to treat it as such, even as a kind of shaggy-dog story.

Very wise of them. Get wrapped up in Whyte’s story, and you end up feeling ill-used. It is as manipulative a piece as “Deathtrap,” and far less skillfully resolved.

What complicates the case is the extent to which you do get wrapped up in it. Whyte may not manage his story very well, but he does know what it is like to live in a wheelchair (he is disabled himself), and his play presents the mechanics of that without looking away.

It also doesn’t look away from the crazy-making aspects of that life, not merely for the person in the wheelchair. His family can become equally imprisoned by his condition, especially if they feel responsible for it.

Here the hero (Andrew Parks) is a quadriplegic, sharing a small New York apartment with his parents (Bill Zuckert and Frances Bray.) At first the mood is slightly zany, as if this were to be another “Butterflies Are Free.” Our hero is young and witty, and his folks are driving him bananas. So he places an ad in a sex newspaper--and a girl (Catherine Theobald) actually answers it.

Guess what? She’s in a wheelchair too. Talk about meeting cute. Meanwhile, there’s a gathering sense that what looks like sitcom is actually closer to Strindberg. The son has charm and high intelligence. (He’s hipped on Nietzsche and Vivaldi.) He has also become a kind of monster over the years, making his parents jump to obey him. Meanwhile, his parents have made a life out of sacrificing themselves to him, their permanent Gerber baby and also their prisoner. It’s Daddy and Mommy and Larry, till death do us part.

This is Freud’s “family romance” in extremis and it’s a strength of the play that we can see it as a criticism of “normal” parent-child relationships as well. Larry and his folks are far-out, but they are part of the continuum. It’s also effective when the play’s comic veneer starts to give way and we find ourselves in a kind of no man’s land, wondering what our author is really up to here.

Unfortunately, this turns out to be melodrama, such lurid stuff that we expect a postscript where Larry wakes in his chair and realizes that it was all a fantasy--something he dreamed up to help him get through another boring afternoon, his real black-beast. We can be grateful to Whyte for not making “Disability” a Disease of the Month play, but what he did choose to make of it is pretty cheap, and pretty flimsy.

Frank Condon’s production rises to the challenge of presenting a really convincing picture of a quadriplegic’s day, including the bathroom details. The scene where Zuckert as the father cleans Parks up for the evening calls for extraordinary trust and patience between the two actors, and it is beautifully handled (Parks is not, it should be said, a quadriplegic: It would be interesting to see the play with an actor who was.)

As acting, not all of the evening goes well, perhaps because the tone of the play does tend to waver. Frances Bay as the mother has to be both a ditherer and a monster, and it’s hard to get the proportions right. Theobald, as the girl who breaks up the family romance, has the right brassiness, but her lines still sounded like lines on opening night. “Disability” has so much “business” that its cast may only now be getting down to working on its emotional dynamics.

P.S. This will be the Odyssey’s last show at its current address. It is about to become a video store. Progress strikes again.

Plays Wednesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m., with matinees at 3 p.m. this Sunday and June 25. (No evening performance on those dates.) Tickets $14.50-$18.50. 12111 Ohio Ave. (corner of Santa Monica and Bundy.) Reservations: (213) 826-1626.