STAGE REVIEW : Murky Melodrama Clouds ‘Made of Glass’

The world in Morris L. West’s “The World Is Made of Glass,” now at Actors Alley Repertory Theatre, is made not of glass but, like life, of badly constructed scenes.

This American premiere of a dramatic adaptation by West (“The Devil’s Advocate,” “The Shoes of the Fisherman”) of his novel of the same name, is a case of two grasps exceeding a reach: The writer attempting to dramatize a moment in the life of psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, and the company trying to bring that moment to life.

All in vain. The Morris play is too wordy and clumsy, beginning with a dream sequence (poorly identified as such at Actors Alley) and ending in paroxysms of pure melodrama. The middle is one extended recounting of a woman’s mildly titillating sexual dreams and fantasies--nothing you won’t find in Kinsey or Krafft-Ebing, and presented here almost as clinically.

(This is needlessly interrupted from time to time by the graphic miming of events behind a scrim by John Shaw, Lauri Hendler and Rebecca Brooks, with Shaw tripling up in roles as father, husband, lover, adding to the confusion.)

The problems begin with the fictionalization of historical characters (always tricky), multiplied by a quaint, almost prissy neo-Victorian approach. We see Jung (David Morgan), far too simplistically, as a lascivious man caught in his own web of psycho-analytical disorders, rebuked by his wife Emma (Susan Mackin) for having affairs under her nose, resisting control by his imperious mistress Antonia Wolff (Brenda Isaacs), and succumbing--horrors!--to involvement with his new and still more imperious patient Magda Kardoss Von Gamsfeld (Joan Benedict), a name that somehow sets the tenor of the character and the piece.

One can see the temptation for director Jeremiah Morris of doing an unproduced play by a well-established author, but also something Morris failed to recognize: the reason why, in the four years since it was written (except for a brief run staged by West himself as a fund-raiser in his native Australia), this play remained unproduced. Its transitions are awkward, its characters shallow, its style antiquated and its point a mystery.

Morris’ direction sheds no light. Rather than counterbalance the soap opera, he encourages it. His actors are at sea. Morgan is such an ordinary fellow as Jung that you wonder why these women are fighting over him. The women are attitudes, not flesh and blood, so that none of them can be taken too seriously. Isaacs relies on imperious, Benedict on seductive-imperious. Mackin is slightly luckier. She gets to chide her husband for being a tiresome bully. One can only, in shared mystification, agree.

Gary L. Wissmann’s set is adequate, but Ann M. Archbold’s lighting design doesn’t distinguish enough between dream and reality and Zale Morris’ 1913 costumes seem a bit haphazard in their attention to period.

At 4334 Van Nuys Blvd. in Sherman Oaks, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., with matinees, Aug. 27 and Sept. 10 at 2. Ends Sept. 16. Tickets: $13; (818) 986-2278.