STAGE REVIEW : ‘Nerd’ Tries a Little Too Hard to Be Liked

Lamb’s Players Theatre tries real hard to make you laugh in its production of “The Nerd,” playing through April 7. Sometimes it succeeds.

Larry Shue’s play about a Terre Haute, Ind., architect whose life is thrown into chaos when a fellow war veteran turns up to move in with him is rife with the zingy one-liners and comic confrontations that can send tears of laughter flowing down your face without a moment’s warning.

“I teeeeach slooooow leeeeearners,” says the wife of the architect’s boss as she explains what she does for a living.

“I can’t conceive,” she adds later, innocently answering an innocent question. “We all wish,” the architect’s friend says dryly as he eyes the woman’s irritating child.

But the show is also fairly contrived, and if you’ve seen it before in local incarnations at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre or the Pine Hills Dinner Theatre, you can hear the gears creaking as the pieces fall into place.

The architect, Willum Cubbert, needs something to shake up his life, a common enough theme in buddy stories with one straight and one unpredictably zany character.

Cubbert can’t seem to stand up to his boss, Warnock Waldgrave, who wants him to modernize all the personality out of the office building he is designing. Cubbert can’t seem to gather up the determination or the courage to go after the woman he loves, Tansy McGinnis, who is about to leave town to become a weather girl in Washington.

Enter Rick Steadman, who claims to be the army veteran who saved Cubbert’s life in Vietnam when Cubbert was out cold in the line of fire. Steadman never stuck around to meet Cubbert when he regained consciousness; now he re-enters Cubbert’s life and, by virtue of being the quintessential nerd, pushes Cubbert to the momentous brink of taking an aggressive action--if only to get rid of the pesky Steadman.

And because one aggressive action leads to another (telling off the boss, going after the girlfriend), one could say that Steadman saves Cubbert’s life once again.

Shue, like playwright Joe Orton, died tragically young, just as his comic talents were starting to flower with “The Foreigner” and “The Nerd.”

He was less deft with character than with timing and clever plot contrivances. Because he moves the characters around like chess pieces rather than people in his complicated plots, the slowest parts of his work have the characters working on their relationships.

Despite the considerable talents of an actress such as Carmen Beaubeaux, it is hard to do much with the part of dedicated career woman Tansy McGinnis, who spends all of what seems to be her considerable spare time cleaning up Willum’s place and making food for his sundry dinner parties. There’s not much more Luther Hanson can do in the cliche-ridden, sub-sub-melodramatic part of Axel Hammond, the wisecracking theater critic who once was in love with Tansy and now has dedicated himself to making her happy with Willum.

The simpler parts work better simply because less shading is required. Doug Waldo does a fine job portraying the “stuck in a rut” Willum, James Pascarella is amusingly outraged as the fiery boss, and Cynthia Peters is very funny as the boss’ much put-upon wife, Clelia.

But David Cochran Heath wins hands down as the actor who is having the best time with his part; he gets to play Rick Steadman in the most iridescently irritating way imaginable. His isn’t the explosive nerd that the Pine Hills Dinner Theatre used or the baleful nerd offered by the Gaslamp. Heath instead has the practiced manner of a veritable doctor of nerdiness who can discern the one slender part of Willum’s mind that hasn’t been bugged yet, slip the needle right in and smile innocently as his victim writhes.

Director Robert Smyth is at his best when he has a human foil for Willum on stage, be it Steadman or Waldgrave. He is less adept at setting a fire under the triangle of Willum, Tansy and Axel or at setting some of the visual jokes.

The comedy also falls flat in the scene where Waldgrave’s child, Thor (a spirited Sean Sedgwick), hides in the closet and peeks out only to be freaked by the sight of Rick in a monster costume. The lighting, by Nathan Peirson, is so bright and the figure is so far away and unthreatening that the fear seems obviously faked. More comedy is lost later when the sound, engineered by Heath, is absent in the scenes where dishes are supposed to be smashed offstage.

But the worst offense is the game in which Rick gets everyone to take off their shoes and socks and race around with paper bags over their heads. The problem is not so much that the scene never quite pops as it should, but the fact that Smyth changes Rick’s request for a Bible to play the game with to a request for a Declaration of Independence. Was this self-described Christian theater troupe offended by what might be construed as a joke about the Bible?

Lamb’s may be a theater troupe “focused by a commitment to Ensemble and Faith,” as it says in the company’s program, but theaters have an obligation to be equally focused to the vision and the words of the playwright whose work they are presenting.

If you have a problem with a play, you have the freedom not to produce it. But if you are going to produce the play, you should respect the text. Lamb’s played similarly fast and loose with Shue’s “The Foreigner,” changing the evil evangelist to an insurance salesman.

These are disappointingly amateur decisions from a company that has the talent to promise professional quality.

The show may leave you laughing, but the changes in the script and the principle behind making such changes sours the humor.

‘THE NERD’

By Larry Shue. Director is Robert Smyth. Set by Mike Buckley. Costumes by Veronica Murphy Smith. Lighting by Nathan Peirson. Sound by David Cochran Heath. Stage manager is Sharon Maley. With Doug Waldo, Carmen Beaubeaux, Luther Hanson, James Pascarella, Cynthia Peters, Sean Sedgwick and David Cochran Heath. At 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Saturdays, through April 7. Tickets are $13-$17. At 500 Plaza Blvd., National City. (619) 474-4542.