STAGE REVIEW : ‘Downside’: FunnyLook at Corporate Scruples

Think how many sitcoms have centered about the gang down at work--”Cheers,” “Taxi,” the old Mary Tyler Moore show. The gang may bicker a lot, but they care about each other and try to put out a good product.

That’s the way we Americans like to see ourselves, and it may account for a certain hesitation in the laughter (considerable) generated by Richard Dresser’s “The Downside” at the Pasadena Playhouse Sunday afternoon.

If the program didn’t tell us that Dresser has sitcom experience (he wrote for “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd”), we could guess it from the expert way he sets up a punch line in “The Downside.” We don’t know what the joke is going to be, but we can feel it being launched, and it comes in right on the button.

Dresser puts out a good product himself. But “The Downside” has its doubts about the American workplace at the end of the 1980s, and that may account for the uneasiness of response Sunday. Perhaps it was the uneasiness of recognition.

Quick with the quip as they are, the office gang in this play isn’t even remotely lovable. And not very smart either. The nonsense level in their industry has risen to the point where the truth of a situation is laughably irrelevant, even if human lives are at stake (as applies, their industry being pharmaceuticals).

What’s “key,” to borrow from their jargon (Dresser has great fun doing so), is how things are going to look--to top management, to the FDA, to the public. So, you do what has to be done: Cut a few corners, pretend you haven’t seen the lab report, get an aging associate fired. He was dead in the water anyway.

Actor John Getz is particularly deft at implying that there’s a certain heroism involved with being a corporate rat--that at certain moments a man must selflessly sacrifice his own morality so that others may live. Does Getz believe it? It’s hard to know what anybody in the marketing department at Mark and Maxwell really believes. It’s not exactly something you discuss at meetings.

The campaign of the moment is to get a certain stress-reducer into the marketplace ahead of the competition, even if there’s a little problem with possible side effects due to “a slight reformulation for manufacturing purposes.” (Again, Dresser has a perfect ear for the phrase that says nothing.)

If it’s funny to see how much stress is needed to get a stress-reducer on the market, it’s also disquieting to realize that the sitcom-style exaggerations of the play aren’t that exaggerated. No, a young executive with problems at home (Matt Salinger) probably wouldn’t actually take to living in his office, particularly after he had been fired.

But strange things do go on in those glassy towers out on the turnpike after everybody has gone home for the night, and also during business hours. Actor Eddie Jones is outstanding as an older executive who can pull himself together beautifully at a conference, but who is a disaster area when alone--and he’s making some big decisions in that top office.

Then for pure comic relief we get James Eckhouse as Carl, one of those middle-management types who survives by not understanding the situation--whose major skill is in making all of his colleagues look good by comparison. No matter how severe the “restructuring” of a company, the Carls always survive, like cockroaches. Ain’t it the truth.

As for romance, this office is not immune to it, although romance is not exactly the term. Megan Mullaly plays Roxanne, a secretary to whom the most extraordinary things happen over the weekend, and Meagen Fay is Diane, a junior executive to whom nothing at all happens. They learn something from each other, but not necessarily something positive.

“The Downside” will make you think of “Working Girl” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (certainly Carl’s method). But it also may suggest Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People,” with its skeptical view of what men and women really are once their self-interest is threatened.

And Kelly Connell as a nerd named Stan may remind us, when we see where he ends up, of the merger mania that struck American business in the 1980s. This is a timely play, and therefore an edgy one. It would work better on a set less spacious and detailed than that designed by Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio. This production goes less briskly than the original at the Long Wharf Theatre two seasons ago, also directed by Kenneth Frankel.

But “The Downside” is largely upside, including Paul Guilfoyle’s performance as a “film maker” doing a cinema verite documentary on the company--i.e., a commercial. Pure Hollywood, and pure hysteria.

At 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena, Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Jan. 14. Tickets $28.50. (818) 356-PLAY. ‘THE DOWNSIDE’

Richard Dresser’s comedy, at the Pasadena Playhouse. Director Kenneth Frankel. Set Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio. Lighting Martin Aronstein. Costumes Kathleen Detoro. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Production stage manager Catherine Cary. Video images Jack Allaway. Casting Donna Isaacson and Ruben/Fertig Casting. With Kelly Connell, James Eckhouse, Meagen Fay, John Getz, Paul Guilfoyle, Eddie Jones, Megan Mullaly, Carl Reggiardo, Matt Salinger.