STAGE REVIEW : Staging Relieves Blahs

The great existential question at the heart of Argentine playwright Ricardo Talesnik’s “La Fiaca” is this: Do we get up and go to work this morning or don’t we? Guess.

This issue is the crux of the ever-so-slight comedy of protest that opened Wednesday at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage in Balboa Park. Smartly translated by Raul Moncada and inventively staged by Lillian Garrett-Groag (who also hails from Argentina), it is more ambitious than successful at examining a universal dilemma few of us seriously think about.

We tend to accept work as an adjunct of life and slog away at our jobs, grateful for the food on the table and the fringe benefits.

The closest one can come to translating the expression, la fiaca , into English is the blahs . The Monday morning blues. Nestor (John Kassir) gets up on one such Monday and does what others only dream of doing: He announces he’s not going to work. He’s going to stay in bed, play with his toys, eat his favorite food, read his favorite comics and do nothing.

His wife. Martha (Cristina Soria), is stunned. So is his mildly hysterical mother (Helena Carroll, doing one of those how-can-you-do-this-to-me? routines). His browbeaten colleague Peralta (Jonathan Nichols) is in awe and more than a little envious. The officious man from the personnel office (Jesus Ontiveros) is confident he’ll be able to fix this matter in a hurry. And Nestor’s boss (Luther Hanson), who is holding more strings than we care to imagine, keeps a tight rein to the bitter end.

It is bitter, and Talesnik’s point--that no matter how much of a taste for revolution we have, society will beat us down--is arguable. Nonconformists have always had the power to change the world. But surely not Nestor, who shows a strong taste for regression into childhood, with no imagination.

That’s the problem. Talesnik has gone about his little comedy backwards. He has created some delicious special business that keeps interrupting his play and is consistently superior to it.

This includes imaginary sequences in which Nestor and his friend Peralta act out the roles they’d rather play in life (Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra among them) than the ones they are given to play (faceless clerks in a large, faceless company). That’s “La Fiaca” at its best.

But Talesnik hasn’t thought things through. We can easily guess why Nestor is fed up with paper-pushing, but other than fantasizing, are given no hint of what alternatives he has in mind. He merely behaves like a kid, and when those around him get sick of supporting his self-centered childishness and let him forage for himself, Nestor doesn’t even try.

Is this guy a role model, a wimp or an idiot? That’s where Talesnik founders. The comedy radically changes course with unconvincing intimations of a hunger strike designed to change the world.

It doesn’t even change the course of Nestor’s life, whose own inertia dooms him. The cynical final scene is not so much a threatening reminder of what’s in store for us all, as an example of one fool’s lack of initiative and a playwright’s unearned apotheosis. This theatergoer simply didn’t buy it.

It’s hard to tell how much of the clever stage business here is Talesnik’s and how much director Garrett-Groag’s, but the labored text (it huffs and puffs) is unquestionably propped up by the deftly contrasting zaniness.

That part works, even if it also points up the weaknesses of the plot without being able to redeem them. What doesn’t work is the change of direction from farcical to tragic, not because, like oil and water, the styles don’t mix, but because Talesnik, like Nestor, does little to stir up the mixture.

The actors struggle valiantly to convince us that they believe the unbelievable, with only limited success. Talesnik’s device of a clown figure (Hanson) running the show is a welcome fillip. It sets the tone. And designer Robert Brill has provided some vivid touches that reinforce it. Whatever “La Fiaca” has going for it, it would seem to owe to Garrett-Groag. She keeps up a brisk pace and a screwy sense of fun. They are no substitute for poorly thought-out odds and transparently thin material, but they do help the medicine go down.

* “La Fiaca,” Old Globe Theatre, Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego, 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours.