STAGE REVIEW : A Real and Imagined ‘Woman in Mind’

It’s no news to anyone who’s a rabid follower of playwright Alan Ayckbourn (is there is any other kind?) that he not only has found the way to make acute pain the key to laughter but that he does it with a fondness for geometric patterns that playfully up the ante of the challenge.

Ayckbourn earlier delivered “The Norman Conquests,” a trilogy with simultaneous action taking place in two rooms of a house and a garden; “Taking Steps,” a play with action on three floors of a house; “Absurd Person Singular,” which takes place at three different Christmas parties, and “Intimate Exchanges,” with multiple permutations dictating a raft of different outcomes for the piece.

And now comes the Southern California premiere of “Woman in Mind,” closing production of the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company season, which opened Thursday at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre. Whatever it surrenders in structural complexity, it makes up for in psychological implication.

Meet Susan (Rosina Widdowson-Reynolds), a middle-aged, middle-class, middle-married English woman, ready to go bonkers. She only needs a little push, and she gets it from an obliging garden rake left idly under foot. The bump it delivers to her head brings out the gremlins in her mind.

Suddenly, Susan’s world is a profusion of people, real ones and fantasy ones--the kind, loving, rich and glamorous fictional family she’d love to be part of, vying with the boring, stuffy, stifling real family she’s stuck with. What’s a woman, not in but going out of her mind, to do?

Tune out, of course. But Ayckbourn, the sly one, doesn’t let on right away. Susan’s real and imaginary worlds are so cleverly mixed and matched that even designer Tom Mays’ ugly stylized garden doesn’t at first betray the fact that where we are is the Twilight Zone. It takes accident-prone Dr. Bill (a deliciously spacey Kim Bennett) to worm it out of the prostrate Susan. Only later does Ayckbourn, with his customary surprises, let us assemble the puzzle as we go.

What we piece together is a sad tale of a woman besieged by a solemnly dull real-life husband, the Rev. Gerald (Eric Grischkat), and his widowed sister Muriel (Geraldine Joyce) who lives with them. Described as “grim-looking in a firm sort of way,” gray Muriel cooks “gray omelets” and makes “delicious” coffee by pouring hot water over unground beans.

Susan and boxy Gerald managed to have a dull, boxy son Rick (Bryan Bevell), who resents his mother’s brightness and has fled to join a religious sect. Is it any wonder that Susan finds solace in her invented Andy (Johnny Warriner), a dashingly attentive husband who looks like he plays polo all day long? Or her loving, invented daughter Lucy (Lisa J. Moore), engaged to marry the elegant, also invented champagne-drinking Tony (Stan Madruga Jr.)?

It is hardly the first time this playwright has traded on the quiet desperation of midlife crises. Long-suffering Susan is related to long-suffering Sylvie of “Intimate Exchanges.” But she reminds us of no one so much as the lonely, philandering wife in Alan Bennett’s “Bed Among the Lentils,” played by Maggie Smith last year on PBS.

Red-headed, high-strung Widdowson-Reynolds even looks like Smith, though her Susan merely philanders in the mind. She doesn’t traipse off to the neighboring village in search of a real-life lover.

However, Ayckbourn does stir up the pot to make sure, before this thing is over, that real-life mixes it up quite thoroughly with fiction. “Woman in Mind” has exquisite philosophical reverberations that must not be revealed here.

The Gaslamp production, nimbly staged by Ginny-Lynn Safford, is respectable if not consistently stylish. Certainly, Widdowson-Reynolds easily shoulders the play with a wounded look that won’t let us forget that she could come apart at any moment. But Warriner’s Andy is more Boris in “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” than a British aristocrat, and Madruga labors too hard at becoming Tony.

Moore, however, is a convincingly sweet Lucy, and Joyce is at her best as Muriel when at her most heinous. Grischkat and Bevell make a believably lumpen father and son, but opening night gremlins infiltrated Alexandra Pontone’s lighting scheme, so that the lights supposed to help us distinguish between fact and fantasy were not always doing the job.

Fortunately, Ayckbourn was doing his and Gaslamp has a crowd-pleaser that should bring in the audience and help lessen some of its lingering financial problems.

“Woman in Mind,” Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 4th Ave., San Diego. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; matinees Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends March 17. $20-$22; (619) 234-9583. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

‘Woman in Mind’

Rosina Widdowson-Reynolds: Susan

Kim Bennett: Bill

Johnny Warriner: Andy

Lisa J. Moore: Lucy

Stan Madruga Jr.: Tony

Eric Grischkat: Gerald

Geraldine Joyce: Muriel

Bryan Bevell: Rick

A Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company presentation of Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy. Producing director Kit Goldman. Director Ginny-Lynn Safford. Set Tom Mays. Lights Alexandra Pontone. Costumes Mary Larson. Sound Jim Mooney. Stage manager Maria Mangiavellano.