STAGE REVIEW : Durang Has Last Laugh in ‘Bette’

To laugh at something isn’t to make light of it. Playwright Christopher Durang specializes in a kind of cancer-ward humor, where the thing most feared becomes the object of the most ferocious joke one can think of.

Laughing at Sister Mary Ignatius and all her works--to name Durang’s most famous heroine--is the first step to getting out of her grip. You need to be tough on her; she was tough on you. Once you have pulled free, however, it’s possible to start admiring the old bat.

In “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Durang does for (or to) his family what he did for his favorite teacher. This is Durang’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a laying of family ghosts. But it is played like a cartoon, so as to avoid O’Neill’s mistake of buying into the family curse.

A very healthy impulse and a painfully funny play. As in O’Neill’s tragedy, we get the sense of a family as a nest of lonely people dedicated to making each other miserable. But here, for some reason, it’s the stuff of laughter.

Not because the pain is downplayed. Peter Sagal’s LATC program note suggests that this will be the approach. “No one in this play wants to hurt anyone else.” Happily, director Dennis Erdman is having none of this. The eye-for-an-eye principle is seen as the very foundation of a Christian family life.

Boo (Guy Boyd) insults Bette by getting drunk all the time. Bette (Christine Ebersole) counters by getting pregnant all the time. The baby is born dead, as was bound to happen, Bette and Boo being victims of the Rh factor--and everybody is happy.

Bette and Boo learned these tactics at home. Boo’s dreadful father (Bryan Clark) has terrorized his tremulous mother (Lynn Milgrim) into being (his little joke) “the dumbest white woman alive.” Bette’s mother (Angela Paton) has scared her sister (Lela Ivey) into being the guiltiest Catholic girl ever.

This is known as the family romance. The fact that it’s a Catholic family adds a layer of things for the characters to be nervous about, including a rather forlorn priest named Father Donnally (Stephen Tobolowsky), no match for Sister Mary Ignatius. But Durang doesn’t make as big deal of the church as one might expect. Father Donnally doesn’t press Bette to have all those babies. Bette is positive that she was meant to have them, and she intends to keep on doing so until she gets a good one. The indoctrination comes from Hollywood as much as from Rome, but the real problem is Bette, whom Ebersole shows us will not take “No” or even “Maybe” for an answer.

The real problem, Durang seems to be saying, is human nature. Put these people in any culture, and they’d be on each other’s case. Durang’s narrator, and clearly his surrogate, is Bette and Boo’s son, Matt--the one blue bundle that lived. He’s trying to understand why people keep setting such exquisite traps for themselves, and by the end of the play it’s still a mystery to him. A mystery that he’ll probably play a role in, down the road.

Actor David Marshall Grant ends the play on a note of acceptance--not a whimper; not a smile. His Matt progresses through adolescent shell-shock to the point of being able to feel a bit of sympathy for the hell his parents went through, and we sense a real, if small, gain.

Earlier, however, Grant makes Matt so diffident that we don’t pick up on Matt’s dread that his family’s problems are somehow both his fault and his responsibility. Durang was to have played the role at LATC originally (he had to drop out for a screenwriting assignment). The character might have been clearer with the author at his elbow.

No one else in the play changes a fraction--it’s part of Durang’s point that families don’t change, unless it’s to get even more impossible. Director Erdman’s cast makes strong choices about who their characters are and what they want, and the only drawback is that the character sometimes misses the layer of self-deception that makes certain domestic monsters so fascinating.

Angela Paton as Bette’s mother, for instance, would be funnier if she hid her wolfishness a bit--if in some sense, she really did wish the best for her children, at least in her own mind. Bryan Clark’s big smile as he destroys his wife (Milgrim’s wonderful) is more like it.

Ebersole is all presence as Bette, Boyd all absence as Boo, and that’s the right combination. Tobolowsky’s Father Donnally may be too soulful, forgetting that “Bette and Boo” can’t afford to get too real about all this stuff, or we get into O’Neill territory, where it can’t compete. Better to go for the fun in the role, and let the darkness take care of itself.

Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Closes Sept. 17. Tickets $22-$26. 514 S. Spring St. (213) 627-5599.

‘THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO’ Christopher Durang’s play, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Director Dennis Erdman. Set John Iacovelli. Lighting Casey Cowan. Costumes Marianna Elliott. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Original music Richard Peaslee. Stage manager Nancy Ann Adler. With Guy Boyd, Bryan Clark, Christine Ebersole, Jane Galloway, Stefan Gierasch, David Marshall Grant, Lela Ivy, Lynn Milgrim, Angela Paton and Stephen Tobolowsky.