STAGE REVIEWS : 3 Faces of Eve : ‘Higher Source’ Loses Its Powers Halfway

“A Higher Source,” a new play at the Way-Off Broadway Playhouse, plays like a sitcom awkwardly married to a soap opera. Orange County playwright Allison Gappa is more successful in the sitcom vein, and her premise has amusing possibilities, but one act of it would have been plenty.

The heroine, Barry (Michelle Fashian), is to be married within the hour to a lifelong friend, Collin (played with boyish charm by Robert Embree), with whom, alas, she is not in love. In the ladies’ lounge of a posh Vermont inn, Barry, in her bridal undies, is stalling.

Enter a Latina wearing a long, curly, red wig. This is Moralis, an overzealous junior Cupid who has misused her supernatural powers to incite love, or at least lust, between Barry and a lying, two-timing boozer named Blake (played by Jim Bogner as a humorless lout with one expression). In order to save her assignment, Moralis must stop the wedding of Barry and Collin and reform Blake.

Suddenly, time freezes, and a pair of higher-up Cupids are with us, ordering a flashback of the whole Barry/Blake/Collin mix-up. Then come the soap-opera scenes, like rocks in a very fragile souffle.

Fashian’s comic sense, displayed in the opening, is completely suffocated by the joylessness of these “passionate” interludes.

The one brightly unifying element is Moralis, played by Dani Ballew in the style of a young Lucille Ball doing a Desi Arnaz accent. Ballew isn’t Latin, she doesn’t even look Latin, but she has a wonderfully mobile face and an endearing fearlessness in her pursuit of a laugh.

The stylistic schizophrenia of “A Higher Source” is managed valiantly by this fledgling company, headed by director Tony Reverditto. But Moralis’ malapropisms and lusty wriggling are not enough to sustain two hours, although Tisza Posner, as Barry’s little sister, pitches in with her dryly humorous delivery.

The Way-Off Broadway Playhouse and Acting Studio is a phenomenon in itself. Twelve actors and an audience of 49 are squeezed into a small, low-ceilinged room with inconveniently placed supporting columns. You have to walk through the box office-cum-booth to get to your seat. Local artists’ paintings are on display in the labyrinthine lobby and $1 of every ticket goes to charity. Periodically, a train rumbles by.

These people are determined to make a theater, no matter what. They deserve credit for the sheer audacity of their endeavor.

‘A HIGHER SOURCE’

A Way-off Broadway Playhouse production of Allison Gappa’s comedy. Directed by Tony Reverditto. With Deen Richards, Michelle Fashian, Denison Glass, Tisza Posner, Jan Piehen, Dani Ballew, Robert Embree, Jack Egan, Ron McCaw, Gale Hamilton, Jim Bogner, Maureen Sullivan. Runs through April 29 at Way-Off Broadway Playhouse, 1058 E. 1st St., Santa Ana. Tickets: $10 to $12. Information: (714) 547-8997.