STAGE REVIEW : ‘The Granny’ a Comic Parable in San Diego

Granny is 100 years old--and still eating after all those years. Interminable and insatiable, she’s a perpetual consumption machine. She’ll lick your plate clean, as well as her own. Within 20 minutes after she retires at night, she’s ready for breakfast. And she never gets fat. Her metabolism is a biological miracle.

Give her this day her daily bread--and her daily pasta, popcorn, chocolates, whatever.

This old lady is the centerpiece of “The Granny” ( “La Nonna” ), a remarkably potent comic parable at the Old Globe.

First produced in Buenos Aires in 1977, Roberto M. Cossa’s play was, at the time, a muted howl against the Argentine military dictators. The other characters’ efforts to satisfy Granny invariably fail. While doing her bidding, they gradually lose their moral compass, but she demands still more. Finally, one by one, they “disappear.”

Yet the Granny is not necessarily synonymous with the Argentine regime of the time, for she has outlived it. Her story has a number of other possible interpretations in San Diego in 1990, and it’s part of the fun of this play to apply its symbolism to our own culture.

Let’s see now: Granny as the baby boomer generation, 30 years hence. Granny as a Wall Street buccaneer. Granny as the politicians who ignore the federal deficit. Granny as anyone who is better at consuming than at creating or conserving.

You don’t have to play this game to enjoy “The Granny,” however. Even--or especially--on the most literal level, this is a wickedly funny show. Much of the comedy is due to the inspired casting of John Fleck as the Granny.

The more adventurous Los Angeles theater audiences know Fleck as a outre performance artist with an interest in androgyny, a wide vocal range and a predilection for doing strange things with goldfish. Well, in “The Granny,” Fleck is in deep drag. He gets to hum snatches of opera in his falsetto, then drop into his basso register in the play’s final scene.

But Fleck isn’t just repeating his own act. Twisting his gaze in order to appraise his chances at grabbing another bite off someone’s plate, flicking his tongue in satisfaction over each morsel, then demanding more with steely resolve despite whatever chaos is happening around him, his Granny has the integrity of a precisely sketched cartoon.

Lillian Garrett-Groag’s arena staging, in the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage, doesn’t do full justice to Fleck’s performance. During a long sequence near the end of the first act, the spectators in the north and east sections of the house were roaring with laughter at Fleck’s antics, while those of us in the south and west sections saw nothing but his back.

Nevertheless, Fleck is hardly the whole show. La Nonna’s grandsons, the hard-working Carmelo (Patrick Husted) and the indolent Chicho (Marcelo Tubert) are hilarious as they try to cope with the old woman and the poverty that her gluttony engenders.

As La Nonna’s anxious daughter, Myriam Tubert frets well, to no avail. Rose Portillo’s Maria, Carmelo’s wife, worries with a harder edge; as the only character who isn’t related by blood to La Nonna , she has a degree of objectivity.

Laura P. Vega plays Carmelo’s and Maria’s daughter, Marta, whose dress for her job in a “pharmacy” become progressively sluttier as the play continues (Robert Wojewodski did the costumes). As a hapless neighbor who is roped into matrimony with La Nonna , Julio Medina is a pitiful emblem of foolish vanity.

Garrett-Groag’s ensemble exhibits crackerjack timing. The accents are all over the map, but it doesn’t matter as much in this stylized situation as it would in a more realistic play. Raul Moncada’s translation uses plenty of contemporary American vernacular, the better to draw the parallels between there and here.

Robert Brill designed a house in disrepair, which looks as if it may slide off its foundation at any moment. Around the edges of the stage are fragments of advertisements, touting the good life that has so conspicuously eluded this family.

In Balboa Park, San Diego, Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 18. Tickets: $17.50-$27.50; (619) 239-2255.