STAGE REVIEW : Divining but Not Conquering in Laguna Beach : The playhouse’s production of Jim Leonard Jr.’s play is handsome, and the performances of the two leads are very charming. Despite that, the show is oddly uninvolving.

Depending on your taste, Jim Leonard Jr.’s “The Diviners” is usually either touching or sentimental, haunting or melodramatic.

The handsome Laguna Playhouse production, which opened Thursday at the Moulton Theatre, skirts those distinctions by mounting a generic abstraction that is oddly uninvolving.

Despite two very charming performances from the leads--Roger Shank as Buddy, the so-called “idiot boy,” and Will Dalley as C.C. Showers, the disillusioned preacher--the production as a whole seems to float in no specific time or place, like a flower petal pressed into a family album. You’d hardly know it was the Depression if Herbert Hoover weren’t mentioned so often.

The presentational style of the piece, directed with obvious care by Peter Grego, nonetheless fits the non-realistic setting artfully designed by Andrew Barnicle. He has fashioned a raked, split-level stage and an attractive lacework of wooden posts, snow fence and window frames, all of which is silhouetted against a backdrop of vaulting blue sky.

“The Diviners” has been around since 1980, when it won first prize in the American College Theater Festival New Playwriting Contest and went on to a production at New York’s Circle Repertory Company, which had nurtured the plays of Lanford Wilson, another writer who took the small-town lives of Midwest country folk as his subject.

South Coast Repertory mounted Leonard’s play in 1982, the first time it was done in Orange County and the only time it has been done here professionally. Since then it has become a staple at all levels of amateur performance, which testifies both to its durability and its playability.

The story, set in the fictional town of Zion, Ind., concerns a 17-year-old boy who was traumatized in childhood by the accidental drowning death of his mother. Backward though he is, Buddy is well liked and something of the town mascot.

Along with his terror of water, which keeps him from taking baths (and subjects him to itchy skin rashes), he has an unerring douser’s ability to find underground streams in the otherwise parched earth. For the local farmers who need to tap water, Buddy’s magical water-witching is a godsend.

Nor is that his only divining skill. Even while the sky remains a cloudless blue, Buddy can sense the distant presence of thunderstorms and the approach of rain--which, given his hydrophobia, induces anxiety in him and, when the downpours finally arrive, painful seizures of breathless gasping.

The play has another diviner as well, but of a different sort, in the symbolically named C.C. Showers, a former preacher from Kentucky who has lost his faith in the Gospel. He shows up in Zion looking for work and is hired by Buddy’s father to help fix automobiles and bicycles.

In the meantime, Buddy, who speaks of himself in the third person, becomes close to Showers, revealing his innocence and his deepest fears, his love of nature and his ignorance of it, the aural hallucinations that stem from the death of his mother and his unjustified sense of guilt for being the cause of her death.

Shank’s energetic performance as Buddy could easily have been overblown and histrionic. Instead he gives an endearing, well-shaped portrayal, a little coy perhaps in his use of a lisp, but in the end not precious at all. And whenever a darker intensity is called for, Shank delivers it without suggesting anything maudlin.

Dalley’s understated portrait of Showers has a casual assurance. Though he is not quite as devilishly good-looking as all the women of Zion seem to think, he has a certain grace that translates. Happily, he also conveys disenchantment rather than cynicism, which keeps the spiritual workout that develops in the weak second act from getting too sappy.

The rest of the cast performs at a less-accomplished level, except perhaps for Stuart Eriksen, whose depiction of a farmer neighbor is gently amusing.

‘The Diviners’

Buddy Layman: Roger Shank

Jennie Mae Layman: Michele Moore

Ferris Layman: James Harris

C.C. Showers: Will Dalley

Norma Henshaw: Marge Anderson

Darlene Henshaw: Wendy Abas

Goldie Short: Kate Halvorsen

Basil Bennett: Stuart Eriksen

Luella Bennett: Joyce Eriksen

Melvin Wilder: Glenn Meek

Dewey Maples: Chris Taylor

A Laguna Playhouse production of Jim Leonard Jr.’s play. Directed by Peter Grego. Set design by Andrew Barnicle. Lighting design by Don Gruber. Sound design by Grego and Mario Mariotta. Costume designer Marthella Randall. Through Nov. 10. At the Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Performances are Tuesday to Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. (No matinee Oct. 19, no performances at all Oct. 20.) Tickets: $13 to $18. Information: (714) 494-8021.