STAGE REVIEW : ‘Crossing Delancey’ at Gindi

Before it became a feature film, Susan Sandler’s “Crossing Delancey” was a play; but the play is such a low-calorie confection that it feels as if it were adapted from yet another medium--TV movies. Bent on being a contemporary fairy tale of two, seemingly ill-matched 30ish Jewish New Yorkers (Carol Keis as the bookish Izzy and Harris Shore as Sam the pickle salesman), Sandler’s lighter-than-light comedy never has a fairy tale’s magic, and Jacqueline Kronberg’s thuddingly paced Actors Alley staging visiting the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium tends to bring things down even further.

What “Crossing Delancey”--play and production--clearly lack are something of the heavenly Yiddish spirit of a Marc Chagall painting blended with the contemporary unpredictability of Craig Lucas’ Gotham relationship plays. While Sandler suggests that there’s something predestined about Izzy’s match with Sam, despite her taste for things more literary than pickled herring, we do wonder if it will ever happen. And like any good fable of yore, there’s the ogre (Matthew Clair’s self-satisfied author, Tyler) and the mediums of goodwill (Elsa Raven as Izzy’s wily grandmother Bubbie and Karen James’s matchmaker Hannah, who arranges mates between meals).

But Sandler’s sources and inspirations are a lot more interesting to consider than anything she actually does with them in her play. The scenes click on and off as if racing for commercial breaks, or, worse, as if Sandler ran out of things for her characters to say. Relationships are established--Izzy caring for Bubbie and vice versa, Sam fixing his eye on Izzy and never taking it off--but seldom go further. Sandler seems to have such a horror of complications that when she inserts them into her tidy plot, they feel phony and trumped-up.

There’s nothing for the actors to do to hide this impression, so, for instance, when Clair’s Tyler finally woos Keis’ Izzy, there’s a double layer of manipulation: his, and Sandler’s. At the other end, Raven and James skim by on enormous caricatures that fit perfectly inside a boob tube (James’ face-stuffing shtick gets especially old especially soon). Shore nails down Sam’s commonsensical goodness, though it doesn’t follow--as it happens here--that a good man need be such a boring character. Keis can project a radiant innocence, but hardly hints at Izzy’s inner confusion about love. It lends the evening an emotional vacuum that Starbuck’s jam-packed set and light design can’t even fill.

* “Crossing Delancey,” Gindi Auditorium, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Monday-Wednesday, 8 p.m. $15-$20; (213) 476-9777 ext. 203. Resumes May 22 at Actors Alley, 12135 Riverside Drive, North Hollywood, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; May 31, June 7, 14 and 28, 2 p.m. Ends July 11. $15; (818) 508-4200. Running time: 2 hours.