THEATER REVIEW / ‘SERENADING LOUIE” : Mired Marriages : Ensemble Theatre Company offers an intimate look at two couples and their dysfunctional relationships.

“Nothing seems like an event anymore,” muses Carl (Ron Hastings), the successful architect in the Ensemble Theatre Company’s stirring production of Lanford Wilson’s contemporary drama “Serenading Louie.”

Carl’s detachment is strange and intriguing. On the surface, his life seems to be the answer to an upper middle-class dream: His work is going well, he lives in a wealthy Chicago suburb, he has one kid and another on the way. But he’s just been told by his best friend Alex (Christopher Vore) what he’s sensed all along--that his wife is having an affair.

“It’s like I’m up in the air and they’re on the ground,” Carl says as Alex stares at him in half-drunken confusion. “Like it’s happening to somebody else.”

In an abrupt shift of mood, Carl takes a savage swing at Alex.

Exploring our complex responses to critical life events is playwright Lanford Wilson’s forte. His plays are firmly grounded in the subtle nuances of character--no falling chandeliers, no helicopters.

Instead, he snares us with the wealth of human nature, in all its confounding, funny and tragic dimensions. In this regard, Wilson is the closest thing we have to Chekhov.

And, like Chekhov, Wilson’s work vibrates with his genuine affection for his characters. Even when they do bad things, the reasons are evident and they invariably move us to sympathy rather than condemnation.

When they are performed right, that is.

Fortunately, the Ensemble’s four-member cast is impeccably suited to Wilson’s characters, and director Robert G. Weiss makes admirable use of the intimate 99-seat performance space. This is the most impressive work we have seen from the company in some time.

The play may be set in 1971, but its dissection of dysfunctional relationships rings a disconcertingly timely chord.

There is plenty amiss in the respective marriages of the two friends. Carl is completely helpless in dealing with his wife Mary’s infidelity--unlike Alex, Carl has no ability to abstract from the immediacy of his situation. He sees everything in painfully concrete terms, just like the childhood he remembers with photo clarity. And in a way, it’s this very immaturity on one level that’s driven Mary (Alison Coutts) away from him. Yet even Mary recognizes “I’m getting so mean and small and insular,” and there’s a large measure of sadness in her affair with someone she doesn’t even love.

Vore’s Alex, a brilliant lawyer about to be tapped for a key government post, would prefer to phone in his relationship with his wife, Gabrielle (Dianna Hastings); when he’s home his treatment ranges from indifference to verbal abuse.

Yet Hastings’ Gabrielle is so mired in domestic quicksand that it’s easy to see why Alex has lost respect for her. “Any moment now you’ll hear a woman talking to a roast,” he mutters upon coming home from work. Sure enough, her inane voice comes filtering through the kitchen door.

This doesn’t excuse Alex’s mistreatment, of course, but it helps us understand it. We also understand Gabrielle’s desperation as she sees her husband slipping away, trying to be mature in the face of her mounting anger. And in a telling moment, Vore begins groveling in baby talk, revealing a contradictory dependency on her.

Sadly, our strongest ties are rooted in the childhood needs we can never achieve as adults. When the stresses of those needs exceed our threshold for wrapping pain in the gauze of “socialized” maturity, the results can be as disastrous as we see in “Serenading Louie.” Perhaps, as Carl warns ominously, “We’ve gotten too civilized for our own good.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

“Serenading Louie” will be performed through June 21, Wednesday through Saturday evenings at 8, Sundays at 7 p.m. on May 24 and 31 and June 7, and 2 p.m. on June 14 and 21; at the Alhecama Theatre at 914 Santa Barbara St. in Santa Barbara. Tickets are $14 Friday and Saturday, $12 Thursday, $10 Wednesday and Sunday. For reservations or further information, call 962-8606.