STAGE REVIEW : Comic Relief From Christopher Durang in ‘Laughing Wild’

Now is the time to see “Laughing Wild” by Christopher Durang.

Two years after it opened in New York, most of its laugh lines are still funny. But its specific cultural references are rapidly dating. In a few years, its shelf life will expire.

So, Long Beach’s Studio Theatre has done Durang-watchers a favor by finally bringing “Laughing Wild” to Southern California--and doing justice to it.

It’s a two-person comedy routine as much as it is a play. The first act consists of two monologues, by a Woman and then a Man. They don’t know each other, but both of them refer separately to the same unpleasant incident in a supermarket, in which the Woman bopped the Man on the head because he inadvertently blocked her access to the tuna fish section.

This incident is a clue to the mental state of the Woman. Later, she tells us she’s a mental patient. “I make ‘The Snake Pit’ look like ‘The Love Bug,’ ” she brags.

But this is no drooling, bug-eyed loony. The Woman articulately expresses her irritation over many of the same things that bother urbanites who have never been near a mental hospital. In fact, on a sane-insane spectrum, she is just one step beyond many stand-up comics who earn a living this way.

It’s unsettling to find yourself agreeing with her about something, such as her attitude toward performers who bully the audience into singing along (she cites Diana Ross and Pearl Bailey), and then to hear her add: “I want to see them killed.” Whoa.

The title refers to a line from Beckett’s “Happy Days,” which in turn was lifted from Thomas Gray: “and moody Madness laughing wild amid severest woe.” The toothy face, strident voice and challenging stance of Long Beach’s Woman, Lauri Bell, make up a map of the terrain where laughter, madness and woe intersect.

The Man’s monologue is modeled more on a would-be inspirational speech than it is on a stand-up routine. But his inspiration fails so drastically here that his little lecture about the power of positive thinking also assumes the effect of a comedy act.

He tries to stick to the insights that he has committed to index cards, but his attention is constantly diverted away from the cards and back to the gnawing anxieties that crowd into his mind. Was he breast-fed? Why isn’t he a professor instead of a celebrity interviewer for a sleazy magazine?

Chernobyl, AIDS, his own sexual ambivalence, the lady who bopped him on the head in the supermarket . . . maybe he should just chant “Om” and these things will go away. But even when he tried to observe the Harmonic Convergence in Central Park, he couldn’t stop judging some of the “icky” people around him.

Francis Parkman maintains an ingenuous quality through it all. Durang created this role for himself, but it transfers to Parkman with ease.

After intermission, we go to the supermarket where the Man and the Woman met. We observe some of their dreams about that fateful encounter. This amusing look at different interpretations of the same event is marred only by a gratuitous use of a strobe light.

More dream enactments follow, including the most strained scene in the show, in which the Woman plays Sally Jessy Raphael interviewing the Man, dressed up as the Infant of Prague. (It’s hard for Durang to write a play without some Catholic references.) While the Man’s Infant costume is a vivid splash of color in an otherwise drab setting, this scene takes the in-joking too far.

The show ends, however, with the Man and the Woman achieving a moment of bonding through breathing exercises. Of course, when Durang does breathing exercises, he keeps his tongue securely in his cheek.

This is minor Durang, not as satisfying as “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” for example. And some of the topical references (the Meese Commission, for example) have already faded. Still, it’s an entertaining glimpse of the Durang mind at work and, occasionally, a telling reminder of the dark void behind the laughter.

Michael Lyman directed.

At 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., with one Sunday matinee at 2 on Nov. 19, through Nov. 25. Tickets: $8-$9; (213) 494-1616.