STAGE REVIEW : Funny, Sluggish ‘Memorandum’ : Theater: The pace falters in North Coast Repertory Theatre’s production of tragicomedy by the president of Czechoslovakia.

Bureaucracy, like Frankenstein, the artificial monster that kills its human creator, can crush the life out of anyone who gets mired in its powerful machinery.

One look at the bleaker works of Dickens, Orwell, Kafka--even Joseph Heller, who coined the phrase Catch-22 as a symbol of how bureaucracies ingeniously prevent anything getting done--and you can see who is winning.

It isn’t the humans.

Vaclav Havel, whose play “The Memorandum” is having its local debut at the North Coast Repertory Theatre, knows this struggle between humanism and bureaucracy intimately.

Havel was censored and twice imprisoned by his government in Czechoslovakia for objecting to the Communist Party line. Now that the party has collapsed in Czechoslovakia, he has been elected president.

Can Havel make his humanistic principles live within a government structure? One would imagine so if he took the job. That would give him a more optimistic outlook than he has in “The Memorandum,” a tragicomedy with Kafka-esque overtones that receives a sometimes funny, sometimes sluggish production at North Coast.

“The Memorandum” tells a story of a managing director who receives a letter written in a new artificial language called Ptydepe (pronounced Pity Deep) that no one can or will translate for him.

A bit of summary investigation reveals that his deputy director has been converting all office language to Ptydepe, ostensibly because it is a more precise, unemotional language, but really because he sees it as his path to undermining the managing director and solidifying his own road to the top.

So what if no one understands the language and what little work was going on stops completely? The important thing in this bureaucratic labyrinth is who is in power and how that power can be maintained by spying on employees and preying on their fears by accusing them of bureaucratic offenses (like paying for a record book out of one’s own pocket instead of going for a standard requisition form).

Kafka, a German-speaking Jewish writer from Prague who died in 1924, was very popular in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s when Havel wrote this play. The influence shows as the managing director, Josef Gross, is ultimately corrupted by his paranoia about what the message means.

“We’re reaching for the moon, but we can’t reach each other; we’re splitting the atom, but we can’t stop splitting ourselves,” says the managing director.

Of course, at this point, these are just fine words used by the managing director as he tries to sell out an innocent person in an attempt to save himself, even though he himself is only in the most hypothetical of dangers.

The show requires brisk pacing but, unfortunately, the tempo seems to slip in and out of director Olive Blakistone’s usually capable hands.

The star here is Stuart McLean as the wild-eyed teacher of Ptydepe, who at one point kicks out his last remaining student (Paul Epstein) for “slowing down the class.” McLean has energy to burn. Too bad he couldn’t share some of the overflow with Vinny Ferrelli, whose portrayal of the managing director seems beaten from the opening scene. Ferrelli was terrific in the comic lead in Jack Neary’s “First Night,” but in this play, he appears to have been miscast.

The supporting cast is amusing, but only the scenes at the translation center seem to click into the high gear that suggests the whir of mechanical gears grinding people into its meat.

Mary Prantil is funny as the secretary whose work consists of doing her hair and nails and running errands for her boss. (Stina Sundberg plays a nobler secretary who does actual work at the translation center). But Daniel Grossbard and Robert Stark, as the conniving deputy director and his silent right-hand man, don’t radiate sufficient sinister power to make you fear them when they enter a room.

Ocie Robinson built the set as a giant brain which, cleverly, also suggests the primitiveness of a giant gray cave. The brain, after all, is run by primitive fears as well as advanced intellectual ideas. The brain is a reminder that, as our minds grow increasingly capable of great intellectual leaps, how much keener those fears and paralyzing defense mechanisms will inevitably become.

“We have seen the enemy and they is us,” as Pogo says. That is the story between the lines of “The Memorandum.” For some, this satire may come across as if written in Ptydepe. But all one needs is a moment of reflection to find the secret to the translation in in one’s own brain.

“THE MEMORANDUM”

By Vaclav Havel. Director, Olive Blakistone. Set and lighting, Ocie Robinson. Costumes, Kathryn Gould. Sound, Marvin Read. With Vinny Ferrelli, Daniel Grossbard, Larry Corodemas, Wendy Cullum, Stina Sundberg, Mary Prantil, Stuart McLean, Robert Stark, Don Viiny and Paul Epstein. At 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sundays, through Feb. 24. Tickets are $10-12. At 987-D Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach, (619) 481-1055.