STAGE REVIEW : Meyer Offers a Study of Love in ‘The Geography of Luck’

In the struggle between good and evil . . . it’s easier to dramatize evil. We saw that in Marlane Meyer’s first two plays, “Etta Jenks” and “Kingfish.”

“The Geography of Luck,” which opened Saturday night at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (after an earlier production at South Coast Repertory), is again set in a tawdry landscape: Las Vegas. And it ends with a story about a person eating a snake.

But this time the snake doesn’t have all the lines. Meyer’s hero (Arliss Howard) and heroine (Deirdre O’Connell) make the breakthrough that we were hoping they’d make. Life isn’t just a matter of eating or being eaten.

A love story, then--eventually. But one that demonstrates that the walls between two people don’t come down easily. Meyer has an uncommon sympathy for the male point of view here. She sees that it’s not a simple thing for a man to give in to the female in himself, a requisite if he’s ever going to love a real woman.

Nor is it easy for a woman to relinquish her impulse to punish males, for reasons just as deeply-rooted in her history. Actors Howard and O’Connell show us two busted-up people achieving intimacy an inch at a time, with many a glance at the door. Who finally takes the bull by the horns? The woman. This is realistic.

“Geography of Luck” is not realistic in manner, though, and there are problems with that. Meyer finds a B-movie glamour in strippers, ex-cons, shady leased-car operations and rich women who have more than a few miles on them, and the play at times seems a goof on yesterday’s stereotypes.

Susan Tyrrell ankles onto Howard’s leased-car lot and works her way up to a “test drive” like Ida Lupino sizing up some teen-age gas jockey, circa 1948. The point may be that we are still trapped in yesterday’s sex games, but so much love is lavished on this one stylistically (David Schweizer directed) that we almost seem to be envying the ‘40s. Mixed signals here.

Meyer’s characters also have an unfortunate way of deserting hard, concrete speech (something she’s very good at) for such generalizations as “a man is not a man without a language” and “we appease our appetite for diversity with things.”

Anybody is liable to come out with something like this, but especially Howard’s old cellmate and true spiritual father, played by Tom Rosqui. Rosqui has a wonderful scene with O’Connell when she comes to see him in prison, but he’s doesn’t know what to do with the philosophizing, and you can’t blame him.

The play goes better, though, than it did at South Coast. Not that the cast is necessarily more acute, or that director Schweizer has a firmer grasp of it intellectually. But he understands its music better.

It is a play of many small and rather cryptic scenes. Rather than ending each of them in a blackout, Schweizer and his designers (John Iacovelli, set; Douglas D. Smith, lights; Gregory Poe, costumes) give us something to watch between scenes--a revolving light stanchion, maybe, to remind us that we’re in glitzy Las Vegas; or perhaps just the sight of an actor going offstage.

It’s interesting how effective that can be if the actor goes off in character. Rather than an evening of dots and dashes, the play finds connection.

Schweizer has also taken some of the direness out of the older male characters. John Considine doesn’t play Howard’s father as a dead-eyed crook, but as a guy with some concern for his son--not much but some. And Garrett Morris isn’t necessarily up to the devil’s business with his mojo, at least not from his point of view.

“The Geography of Luck” also plays nicely against LATC’s “Boys’ Life,” another script about men trying to come to terms with the female principle. One could also relate it to LATC’s third current play, “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” in which another young man confronts what his father and mother did to each other.

Basically, though, “The Geography of Luck” is worth seeing because it’s a play by Marlane Meyer, a writer with a real gift for language--when it’s her language and not psychobabble.

Plays at 514 S. Spring St. Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Closes Oct. 15. Tickets $22-$26. (213) 627-5599. ‘THE GEOGRAPHY OF LUCK’

Marlane Meyer’s play, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Director David Schweizer. Set John Iacovelli. Lighting Douglas D. Smith. Costumes Gregory Poe. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Music Steve Moshier. Stage manager Joan Toggenburger. With Tom Rosqui, Arliss Howard, Ennals Berl, John Considine, Garrett Morris, Susan Tyrrell, Deirdre O’Connell and Christine Elise.