STAGE REVIEW : Spreading ‘Rumors’

Neil Simon’s “Rumors,” at the Doolittle Theatre, is a symphony of squirming.

Its characters spend most of the evening wiggling this way, groping that way, improvising tall tales, doing whatever it takes to cover up what happened to their good friend Charlie.

Not that they really know what happened to Charlie. Their behavior is based on rumors and assumptions; Charlie himself is too sedated to be coherent. This, and the fact that these are supposedly sophisticated and powerful people, make their frantic prevarications all the funnier. And all the less likely.

During much of the play, the funny stuff is more apparent than the unlikely stuff. The logic behind Simon’s only full-length farce is faulty at the beginning and the end, but the rest of the play whirs along under a full head of steam. The several misfired gags in the middle section don’t seriously affect the pacing--though a few of them, such as an utterly gratuitous dig at Meryl Streep, are inexplicably repeated.

In an interview in the program, Simon spoke of the importance of establishing how much trouble everyone is in from the very first line. He certainly has the right actress, Kandis Chappell, to open his play at the Doolittle. With her skinny limbs sticking out of her bubble dress, her trembling countenance and her lunges for her forbidden cigarettes, Chappell is reminiscent of a particularly anxious hen. She’s hilarious.

Chappell’s Chris and her husband Ken (Gibby Brand) have arrived at the 10th anniversary dinner party of their friends Charlie and Myra, only to find Myra and the household help missing, the dinner uncooked, and Charlie upstairs with a superficial gunshot wound in his ear lobe. The other guests are about to arrive.

Chris and Ken--who are both attorneys--assume Charlie tried to kill himself. They regard this as a criminal offense that must be hushed up--to protect themselves as well as Charlie, who is a deputy mayor of New York.

If you have no trouble believing they would react this way, you’ll sail into the second part of the play with no sweat. It’s the characters who sweat--the guests start bumping into each other’s accounts of what happened. The spectacle of all this deception obscures the shakiness of the initial premise, at least for a while.

Ron Leibman leads the parade of the put-upon guests and delivers one of his patented super-manic performances. Though it includes a few moments of pure mugging and occasional garbled words, the energy of Leibman’s whiplashed hysteria is quite staggering. Jessica Walter plays his wife with an exasperated socially-upward New York accent and a flair for the catty remark.

As the faintly befuddled Cusacks, Peggy Pope and Dan Desmond serve gamely--and well--as foils for the others’ wisecracks. But Pope is also stuck with extraneous bits that clutter the lines of Simon’s script. Certainly her fuss over her grandmother’s jewelry is expendable. Her character’s occupation has been changed from school principal to TV cooking-show host since the Broadway opening--presumably to make her willingness to jump in as temporary chef more believable.

It’s Timothy Landfield and Lisa Emery, as a local politician and his bitterly jealous young wife, who are blessed with the funniest exchange in the play--an almost surreal round of hostile retorts that establishes their characters within just a few seconds.

The only other characters are a pair of cops (Charles Brown and Mary O’Brady) who arrive in the second act. It’s here that the logic again starts to crack. Brown is first depicted as a tough interrogator who’s itching for a promotion. But then he suddenly folds in the stretch--for the sole purpose of letting the characters off the hook, so the play can end. The final twist is even less credible, when you think about it on your way out the door--not that it wouldn’t happen, but that it didn’t happen sooner.

Gene Saks guided his cast through their cartwheels with the requisite briskness, though some of the business--at the end of the first act, for example, feels contrived. The doors of Tony Straiges’ upper-crust living room get a workout befitting a farce, and Joseph G. Aulisi’s women’s outfits contribute a few jokes of their own.

We never learn the truth of most of the rumors mentioned in the script, especially those of the who’s-sleeping-where variety. While too much truth-telling would drag down most farces, this one could use a greater sense that some of these stories might be true. All that squirming would seem more purposeful, more pungent.

At 1615 Vine St., Hollywood, Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., 2 p.m. matinees on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, through Sept. 23. $26-$36; (213) 410-1062 or (714) 634-1300.

‘RUMORS’

A comedy by Neil Simon, presented by Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre and Emanuel Azenberg. Director Gene Saks. Sets Tony Straiges. Costumes Joseph G. Aulisi. Lights Tharon Musser. Sound design Tom Morse. Production supervision Peter Lawrence. Cast Gibby Brand, Charles Brown, Kandis Chappell, Dan Desmond, Lisa Emery, Timothy Landfield, Mary O’Brady and Peggy Pope.