STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Eastern Standard’ Set to Yuppie Time : Light Though Sometimes Lengthy Santa Ana Production Looks at Urban Professionals on the Edge

The Yuppie Years seem to be fading into the sunset. “For Rent” signs plaster the fronts of the apartment building they bought. Their “in” eateries are slowly diminishing. Some of them have even hit the streets, like May Logan in Richard Greenberg’s “Eastern Standard,” at Way Off Broadway Playhouse.

May (Jan Tiehen) is not a disenfranchised yuppie, though. She’s an unfortunate from Kansas City who just happens to illogically wander into a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, and even more illogically into a clutch of yuppies who still think the world is their oyster.

Just as May might be the last in a long line of comic bag ladies used by playwrights as an icon for a social illness that was only beginning in the ‘80s, Greenberg is probably the last playwright to look at Young Urban Professionals with irony. They’re soon to be nostalgia, sinking slowly in the quicksand of a deepening depression.

When “Eastern Standard” opened in New York a few years ago, Greenberg could still view his subjects with humor and optimism. He even provides them with a blissfully pat happy ending, and maybe that’s part of his irony, along with the fact that May is greedier and more honest than any of the lot.

These characters just aren’t aware that the quicksand is one step away. They’re all blithely thinking of quitting their boring or irritating jobs, a solution few would entertain in the ‘90s. It was an era that director Tony Reverditto seems to understand, and he treats it with a lightness proper to its time. What he doesn’t do is keep his tempos as crisp as they should be, particularly in the lengthy second act, which takes place in architect Stephen’s (Eddie (Zee) Zeman) Long Island beach home, where they have all, including May, retired to bemoan their gilded fate.

Tiehen is inclined to play May broader than she should (and with a New York accent odd for a Kansas City girl). But once she’s been spruced up as a sort of live-in housekeeper, she calms down by the end. Zeman underplays Stephen, sometimes to the point of extinction. He frequently falls into mannerisms that belong less to Stephen than to Cary Grant, whom he somewhat resembles (and he’s aware of it), but they don’t work.

Marnelle Ross fares much better as Phoebe, a Wall Streeter rebounding from her affair with a crooked trader, though the sharp edges of her performance might realistically put off her burgeoning relationship with Stephen. As the actress-waitress illogically invited to the party, and who also drags May along, Tracy Merrifield is as adept at switching her mood and tone as she is her wigs and makeup, and has some moments that are honest and a little touching.

Greenberg’s best writing, though, is given to artist Drew (Bill Lasselle), Stephen’s gay ex-roommate from college who is desperate for a meaningful relationship, and Phoebe’s gay TV producer brother Peter (Shawn Smyth), who confides early on to Phoebe that he has AIDS. Their dialogue is fresh (Peter summons waitress Ellen with “Oh, actress!”) and, in the scene where Peter admits his illness to Drew, heartbreaking. Lasselle and Smyth are the only ones with the crispness and spirit the writing demands.

The others may catch fire as the production runs.

Dave Carleen’s sets and Cathy Langston’s lighting are right, though a low-horizoned blue sky rather than sketchily painted dunes would have added to the sense of emptiness surrounding Greenberg’s images of the tail-end of a passing parade.

‘Eastern Standard’

* A Way Off Broadway Playhouse production of Richard Greenberg’s play. Directed by Tony Reverditto. With Eddie (Zee) Zeman, Bill Lasselle, Tracy Merrifield, Jan Tiehen, Marnelle Ross and Shawn Smyth. Sets by Dave Carleen. Lighting by Cathy Langston. Performances Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Aug. 16, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 16. Way Off Broadway Playhouse, 1058 E. First St., Santa Ana. $15; (714) 547-8997. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes. reunion with father Jacob and his repentant siblings all race by. Webber uses calypso, rock and country to keep the ball bouncing.

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