STAGE REVIEW : ‘Emerald City’: Adventures in the Film Trade

Poor Colin--which is to say, poor David Williamson, who created Colin in his own self-image, as the central figure in his “Emerald City,” at South Coast Repertory.

Though he’s “the screenwriter with the best track record” in Australia, he has been beset by intellectual snobs in Melbourne. They just don’t understand the importance of his self-assigned role: to write about the denizens of the middle class and to “keep charting their perturbations.” So he flees to Sydney, where he finds himself beset by philistines.

We learn all this within the first few minutes of “Emerald City,” and right away we know most of what there is to know about the play, as well as about Colin. It’s essentially an explanation of Williamson’s own career moves, a self-justifying and self-pitying chart of his own professional “perturbations.” It becomes self-deprecating only on the most superficial level, the “look at me, I can even make fun of myself” level.

Though it’s written in what’s supposed to be a realistic style, the dialogue often sounds flagrantly false, as if “Emerald City” were composed as an autobiographical essay and then rushed into dramatic form without much thought given to the idea of natural-sounding conversation (or is “perturbations” tossed out in Australian chitchat more than it is here?).

The dialogue is occasionally funny, too; Williamson makes sure that Colin, representing himself, gets most of the best quips. Sometimes, though, it’s all thunderingly banal. “You’re going to have to decide,” Colin’s wife tells him, “between art and money.” There isn’t a trace of subtlety in this play.

Williamson probably thought he was addressing subjects bigger than Colin: the unending conflicts between commerce and art, between Sydney and Melbourne, between egos in marriages of two professionals.

But these subjects haven’t been skillfully dramatized. The play is about Williamson’s opinions on these topics, more than it’s about the topics themselves. We don’t meet any of the Melbourne-based “Chardonnay socialists” who criticize Colin, or any of Colin’s children who apparently have been affected by the move to Sydney--we simply hear Colin and his wife discussing them.

Likewise, there is a lot of talk about preserving Australian culture in this play, but there are few examples of it. Characters’ tongues wag over the prospect of Australian film projects being transplanted to America, in greedy attempts to appeal to the international market. Yet aside from a few slang words, this play could just as easily be about a writer who moved from Berkeley to Bel-Air--which is surely one of the reasons why South Coast is staging it.

Actually, it’s the only reason imaginable--the theme of “Emerald City” fits into the general outline of South Coast’s season. This is the year South Coast stopped ignoring the movie industry and started bashing it. The recent premiere of “Search and Destroy” made this seem like a good idea, but “Emerald City” serves only to point out how much better a play “Search and Destroy” is. Still to come is another commentary on movie making, “Speed-the-Plow.”

At any rate, it’s fun to watch protean Jarion Monroe, who played the smarmiest and most self-confident of all the hustlers in “Search and Destroy,” here playing ever-wavering Colin. He does his best to find corners of this man’s personality that aren’t spelled out in the ultra-explicit text.

The rest of the cast, mostly SCR pros, is just as good: Anni Long as Colin’s wife, a publisher who faces her own conflict between art and money; Richard Doyle as Mike, the grubby partner who temporarily hitches his leaky wagon to Colin’s career; Leslie Hope as Mike’s live-in lover (this is a little hard to believe) and Colin’s potential mistress (this isn’t); Sally Kemp and Dan Kern as a producer and financier, respectively.

Set designer Michael Devine provided a backdrop that suggests the harbor view that most of the characters covet, while remaining abstract enough to serve other purposes too. Peter Maradudin lit it with cool colors, costumer Karen J. Weller added splashes of color on Hope (who looks as terrific as the text requires) and Nathan Birnbaum added a gently throbbing sound track during scene changes. In general, the design is more artful than the text.

But that isn’t difficult. In the Emerald City in “The Wizard of Oz,” we don’t find out what a charlatan the title character is until late in the story; here, Williamson tells us how crass Sydney is in the very first conversation. There isn’t much incentive to follow him down this particular yellow brick road. Where is L. Frank Baum when we need him?

At 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tuesdays through Fridays at 8:30 p.m., Saturdays at 3 and 8:30 p.m., Sundays at 3 and 8 p.m., through April 15. $20-$27; (714) 957-4033.