STAGE REVIEW : ‘Maderati’ Spoofs Pretenders to Art

The pretentious term is the literati . Webster defines it as “the educated class.” In a self-spoofing play on words and perceptions, black writer Zora Neale Hurston once described her Harlem Renaissance crowd with an ironic distortion of the word. Now playwright Richard Greenberg has come up with “The Maderati,” a tongue-in-cheek lampoon of contemporary white upper-middle-class urban types with artistic pretensions. It’s having its West Coast premiere at the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood.

Call Greenberg’s characters the silliterati . Funny as parts of his play are, and sensational as some performances turn out to be under Ron Link’s direction, this broadside at the misadventures of ungifted pretenders to art travels down a blind alley.

“The Maderati” doesn’t go deep (knockabout farce doesn’t have to), but it also doesn’t go far. Greenberg, who took the upscale cousins of these New York yuppies to task in his play “Eastern Standard,” keeps the action whirring with slamming doors and rapid one-liners that give this comedy a giddy, hysterical look. But he failed to secure the hinges.

He might have called his play “Rumors” had Neil Simon not already appropriated the title. This is a younger set of deluded urbanites, just as Greenberg is a younger and, well, greener writer.

In his threadbare plot, Rena and Chuck DeButts (Siobhan Fallon and Michael Halpin) hear that their overweight friend Charlotte (Shawn Schepps), a second-rate poet and first-rate eccentric, has been admitted to a mental hospital. Before dashing to her rescue, they inform another pair of Charlotte’s friends, Dewy and Ritt (Peri Gilpin and Cameron Watson). Big mistake. Not only do these two fail to hear the information, but they misconstrue what they never heard, and the more it travels, the more distorted it gets.

What ensues is a messy comedy of errors. Greenberg had a good idea and puts very funny lines in the service of social spoofing, but his way with words is way ahead of his way with structure--especially when it comes to the basic issue: why Charlotte’s problem is misheard and keeps changing in other people’s ears. The result is forced transitions that undermine even superficial believability. The piece ends as much for a lack of places to go as anything else.

If the trip has its moments, it is chiefly thanks to the actors. Priscilla Barnes is a hoot as the furious Cuddles Molotov, a quasi-psychotic nympho with a red slash of a mouth that she rarely keeps shut, and who seems divinely spawned from the pen of Jules Feiffer.

Schepps is terrific as fat Charlotte, who would rather be anyone but who she is (“You don’t know what if feels like to be a failed divan”). The rest of the cast offers solid support, with Neal Lerner as a narcoleptic young poet in love with Charlotte who writes worse verse than she does, and Christopher Neame as a dazed publisher stricken with habits better kept closeted. On the periphery (but squarely at the center of this group’s collective libido) is Chip Mayer as Danton, a hunk of mumbling Method acting, whose bod seems to be the quest of every woman present--especially the bored and bossy Dewy.

Despite the small stage, Link directs the traffic reasonably well on Yael Pardess’ set. But “Maderati” falls apart even as we watch its shenanigans unfold. Feydeau could have told Greenberg that, to be good, farce must be airtight tragedy to its participants--something this lot doesn’t really believe.