STAGE REVIEW : ‘Shatter n’ Wade’: Rhetoric That Fails to Make a Point : Murray Mednick’s brooding comedy has its occasional funny one-liners, but the play lacks bite.

Life, as we find it in Murray Mednick’s “Shatter n’ Wade,” goes around in circles. That is the chosen course of the brooding comedy that opened Sunday at the Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood.

You can’t quite call it the point of the play. Circles don’t have points. But this one-act’s central idea seems to be to make fun of the pointlessness of much of the rhetoric expended on a variety of social or ecological issues--anything from the nefarious effects of electromagnetic fields on children to sex, unruly teen-agers or viruses (“It’s numbers acting like parasites--and they mutate”).

The circumstances of the play, which had its debut at last year’s Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival, are deliberately undefined. We may be in a schoolyard outside a classroom where a meeting of neighborhood activists is being held. But that’s as much light as Mednick cares to shed.

We hear snatches of speeches each time the door to the room is opened, a gimmick whose comedic potential is quickly exhausted.

The meeting has attracted a colorful collection of nerdish bystanders and earnest proselytizers, seemingly led by one masterful windbag named Sayer (William Dennis Hunt). Sayer, who may be a local politician, certainly holds them all in rapt attention.

Among the comers and goers are a moody fellow called Cross (Scott Paulin) who waxes gloomy or philosophical with little provocation, and whose marshmallow wife Ann (Allison Studdiford) may have had a more checkered past than he knew; an odd duck with five o’clock shadow named Martin (Nick Love); a posturing twerp in black cowboy hat named Wally (James Cox Chambers), and a hilarious ditzoid in lime-green jacket, bandanna and cut-off maroon running pants named Bint (a terrific Mark Fite). A certain emphasis is placed on the kookiness of their appearance because nothing else much defines them.

Sayer has two offspring, a fulminating, red-haired daughter named Shatter (Susannah Blinkoff), who storms on and off frowning a lot, and a zonked-out son named Wade (David Officer) who slinks around, a boom box permanently appended to his right ear. They are the apparent accidents of the title, “Shatter n’ Wade.” But why?

They are only tangentially connected to whatever is taking place on stage, which is one of the many problems that bedevil this “Shatter n’ Wade.” The play has its occasional funny moments, based chiefly on one-liners, but it is too vague to have any bite.

We know too little about everything--this meeting, these people, those kids, the surrounding circumstances. As a result of this imprecision, a lot supposedly satirical takes come off as merely puzzling or preachy on the square.

Since Mednick himself staged the piece, one presumes he aimed for what he achieved. But despite a couple of strong performances (Hunt’s and Fite’s anyway), “Shatter n’ Wade” is too diffuse and confusing to be satisfying. Its central device is clumsy and makes unrealistic demands on an audience. And why do such perplexing things as announce that Wade has green hair when he doesn’t?

The curtain-raiser, “Catullus,” is no less flimsy. A young man (Morgan Weisser) expresses his love by reading to his girlfriend (Maya McLaughlin) from Catullus. It is a tentative courtship, full of self-doubt and and indirection, ending with a statement that puts a sadly different cast on things.

Weisser, who has a lovely presence, unfortunately lacks the verbal skills to do justice to the poetry, while McLaughlin’s role is largely a reactive one.

Kenton Jones has designed a nicely detailed, simple set that works for both plays and is well lit by Jason Berliner. But however serious the effort may have been in the author’s mind, “Shatter n’ Wade” comes off as nothing so much as an inflated exercise masquerading as pregnant theater.

* “Shatter n’ Wade” and “Catullus,” Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends April 14. $15-$18; (213) 852-1445. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.