Mayer’s ‘Love Affair’ Plays for Laughs

Santa Monica Playhouse’s more middle-aged audiences can always count on a few chuckles from a new Jerry Mayer comedy. The third in the series, “A Love Affair,” is no exception in the chuckle department. But it’s also the weakest effort yet from this Westside jester.

Mayer’s work appears to be nakedly autobiographical, and never more so than in “A Love Affair.” In the second act especially, he forsakes the distancing effect of time; this is a nearly up-to-the-minute report on the sexual and financial traumas besetting a late-middle-aged TV writer from Malibu and his wife.

The details might embarrass some in the audience, if not the Mayers themselves. But at least this part of the play is relatively untilled territory. Mayer’s treatment of TV’s younger producers and his own corporeal frailties is wryly amusing--which is all that Mayer ever aims for.

However, the play is structured not as an examination of the Malibu years, but rather as a portrait of a 38-year marriage. So the first act dredges up material about the couple’s St. Louis years--an era already covered more successfully in “Almost Perfect,” Mayer’s first effort. “A Love Affair” also touches on the Encino years of the ‘70s.

The stretch to cover so much time creates a sketchy quality that serves only to underline the TV-style superficiality of Mayer’s writing. It’s a scrapbook more than a play.

Two sets of actors, from two generations, play the same couple. In the first act, the older Jimmy and Alice (George Coe and Alice Hirson) reminisce their way into flashbacks starring the younger Jimmy and Alice (Mark L. Taylor and Susan Cash)--but there is no direct interaction.

That comes in the second act, when the younger pair arrive as down-to-earth apparitions in the older couple’s home, offering their own commentary on the older couple’s experiences. It’s a device that seems to exist primarily in order to give the younger actors something to do in the second act; it certainly doesn’t harvest any particularly acute insights.

The characterizations are schematic: He’s horny and earns the money, she’s organized and manages it. It’s no surprise that Jimmy and Alice are forced by circumstances to enlarge their perspectives by play’s end, yet they still don’t feel like deeply drawn characters. There are too many titters to evoke from the audience first.

The cast snags most of those titters, under Chris DeCarlo’s direction. But it’s more of a strain, this time around.

“A Love Affair,” Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th St., Santa Monica. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Runs indefinitely. $17.50-$20. (310) 394-9779. Running time: 2 hours.