STAGE REVIEW : Kaufman, Hart’s ‘Dinner’ Is Served at West Coast Ensemble

Moss Hart’s son, Chris Hart, has directed a whiz-bang revival of the classic 1939 comedy written by his father and George S. Kaufman, “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”

The production at the West Coast Ensemble in Hollywood is not a trip to an antique shop but a riotous tumble into Depression-era comedy.

This is turning out to be some season for Kaufman and Hart. South Coast Repertory has just dusted off another ‘30s’ hit by the American theater’s two best comic dramatists, “You Can’t Take It With You,” giving Southland theatergoers a tasty Kaufman and Hart menu.

Director Hart notes in the theater program that when he was 9, his father gathered the family and house guests in a screened-in front porch on a rainy afternoon and led a reading of “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” The little boy played a character who had only two words (“Yes, sir”). Hart senior took the bellicose lead, Sheridan Whiteside, who was modeled after celebrated raconteur and wit Alexander Woollcott.

The original production helped keep a nation’s mind off war. You can’t talk about this show without talking social history--which makes the West Coast Ensemble achievement not a study in obsolescence but curiously timely. Even with two intermissions, the show moves with a crispness that itself is enthralling.

The action erupts in an Ohio household’s sumptuous middle-class living room where wheelchair-bound, unwilling house guest Sheridan Whiteside (deliciously gruff I.M. Hobson) hurls his scorn and invective (“I may vomit”) on his bedazed, bedazzled and cowering hosts. The most submissive are the homeowners, portrayed with stodgy elan by the trembling Christy Barrett and the morose Forrest Witt.

Ringing telephones and doorbells fill the air. Romance blossoms between Patrick Pankhurst’s erstwhile newspaper man and Beth Taylor’s spiffy secretary. White-side’s mousy nurse (prim and proper Marjorie Bowman) cringes. Propelling the plot is a gold-digging actress (a sexually subtle performance by glamorous Jan Sheldrick, stylishly begowned in Patricia Wilson’s period-perfect costumes).

An eager brother and sister (bumptious David Youse and Molly Kincaid) race about. A fey, ghostly older aunt (feathery Caden McCourt) drops hankies from the rafters. Surrogate celebrity figures pop in and out, patterned in two instances after Harpo Marx and Noel Coward. The Coward character is exquisitely rendered by Dan Kern.

And that’s only half the cast. Hobson’s worldly, arrogant Whiteside appears to fall in the temperamental middle range of the famous actors who established the play’s luster, interpretations that veered from Monty Woolley’s Falstaffian curmudgeon who’s basically a softie to epicene Clifton Webb’s more splenetic turn.

In any event, here’s a family you won’t forget. Not all the performances are seamless--the doctor and the Harpo Marx characters are overripe and overwrought. And some of the name dropping is arcane; it might help to be over 50.

But, hey, this play’s 51 years young. Chris Hart is still in his 40s, but his love for his dad’s play is palpable.

* “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” The West Coast Ensemble, 6240 Hollywood Blvd., Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 7. $15. (213) 871-1052. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.