STAGE REVIEW : Uneven ‘Lord of Medflies’ From Second City

Whenever Robin Duke is on stage at Second City’s Santa Monica branch, it’s difficult to concentrate on anyone else. Her gawky features, her impossibly wide smile, her elastic figure--they all promise laughter ahead. And they usually deliver.

“Lord of the Medflies,” the group’s latest revue, includes an extended (four-scene) sketch about the perils of jaywalking in Santa Monica. A fairly enterprising examination of a mundane topic, it will be remembered most for Duke’s two subsidiary roles, as a cretinous sidekick to a tyrannical traffic school teacher and as Santa Monica herself.

Oddly enough, Duke is also the star of this revue’s one attempt to go beyond comedy, a soppy little scene in which a woman imagines what her son would be like if she hadn’t had an abortion 14 years ago. She’s so touched by her fantasy that she decides to have a baby. There is no edge to this sketch, no deeply felt pain, and no subtlety either--just a synthetic wistfulness.

Elsewhere in the program, Duke and lanky Ryan Stiles play a perpetually bickering couple who continue their squabbling even beyond the grave. It’s one of the evening’s better moments. And it’s followed by the cleverest conceit of the evening, Michael Hagerty and Chris Barnes as pool hustlers of a different stripe (it would spoil the joke to describe that stripe in any more detail).

Stiles, Barnes and Deborah Theaker, the newest member of the company, make much out of a woman’s over-reliance on her contractor and her therapist. Stiles has a funny solo with a silent guitar.

The action is punctuated with some extremely brief blackouts. One of them, about traffic on the 405 Freeway, is hilarious (Duke and Stiles again). One, featuring Duke as Rapunzel, is--despite its brevity--much ado about nothing.

Some of the subjects are overly familiar. The cast nevertheless takes a few of these to the limit and succeeds almost in spite of the material--witness a sketch about talkers in movie theaters, or a two-part piece about the Abraham Lincoln display at Disneyland. But in other sketches, the feeling of deja vu is unavoidable, as in a parody of a frothy morning news show and a poke at Exxon--more than a year after the oil spill.

The Exxon sketch is a reminder that this group still hasn’t mastered quick topical satire--listen to virtually any of the numbers sung by the Capitol Steps on public radio, and you’ll hear how much wittier this genre can be. A song that attempts to paint President Bush as Oedipus--or “Oedibush”--fails to fulfill the promise of its initial concept.

John Hemphill, a former member of the Santa Monica company, directed “Medflies,” and Larry Schanker provides musical accompaniment.

At 214 Santa Monica Blvd., Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $7-$15; (213) 451-0621.