STAGE REVIEW : Long Beach Studio Theatre Tries ‘Educating Rita’: Rent the Movie

What’s this? The local premiere of Willy Russell’s 1980 play--and the basis of a hit movie--”Educating Rita”?

Somehow, Russell’s comedy eluded the big boys of L.A. theater, but not the Long Beach Studio Theatre. You’d think the people in Long Beach would make noise about it. They don’t. But there isn’t much to shout about in Bill DeLuca’s tepid production.

The problems begin with the text. Precisely those qualities that made Russell’s play such a natural candidate for movie adaptation--numerous scenes suggesting time’s passage, occasionally brief exchanges between British working class pupil Rita and her alcoholic, self-pitying university tutor Frank, and lots of descriptions of off-stage characters and action--drag down the play itself.

With only one setting--Frank’s office, looking out on an Oxfordian green (John Vertrees’ set is serviceable, if not pretty)--scene after scene plays out in much the same way. Lights up. Frank working away. Rita enters for another day’s tutorial. Lights out. The combination of Russell’s structure and DeLuca’s pacing is numbingly lockstep, reinforced by an unconscionably long, 80-minute first act. Watching comedies should not be like doing time.

The relief from this comes from Katrina Keay’s Rita and the images she triggers based on the situations in Russell’s dialogue. It helps not having seen the movie version, since Keay lets you imagine what happens off stage. There are the early days, when she is still working at the hairdresser’s and fighting with her husband, who thinks she’s having an affair with Frank. Then, as Rita’s intellect grows like a huge tropical bloom, she makes new campus friends and a new life. Finally, Frank’s primacy as mentor is threatened along with his university tenure and identity as a poet.

Russell (“Shirley Valentine,” “Blood Brothers”) is a kind of British grandmaster of working class tributes and treacly sentimentality. His characters seldom rise above the status of symbols, always at the behest of their author’s good-natured, audience-pleasing and terminally predictable narratives. “Educating Rita” so soon becomes an obvious update of “Pygmalion” that it’s like seeing an exercise in a contemporary take on Shaw, without any muscularity of approach.

Ashley Carr’s Frank is similarly wimpy, his ashen performance nudged along as the play demands. Seldom have the actors in a two-person play seemed so far away from each other: Keay driving deeper and deeper into Rita with each turn of her intellectual road, Carr so uninterested in the demons that prevent Frank from putting down the bottle to write that he doesn’t even manage a proper accent (it sounds somewhere between Denver and Johannesburg).

If you can survive the play’s lack of imagination and the production’s claustrophobia, there is a climactic celebration of the mind that is Russell’s only really valuable writing. In this era, that is worth shouting about.

At 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach, on Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., July 15, 2 p.m., until July 21. $9--$10; (213) 494-1616.