STAGE REVIEW : Great Snippets, but ‘Molly’ Is Lacking

One feels a bit like a voyeur at “Molly & Maze,” now playing at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Hahn Cosmopolitan.

The show, written by stand-up comedienne Lotus Weinstock, stars Weinstock and her daughter, actress and concert violinist Lili Haydn, in a story about a stand-up comedienne and her daughter who have much in common with the performers portraying them.

It is essentially a story about letting go, or rather, not letting go. In the first act, Weinstock, in the midst of preparing a Shabbos dinner, worries that she has not prepared her daughter adequately to leave for college. She decides to secretly tape their Shabbos interaction to save for the therapist that Maze may have to go to someday in order to deal with her crazy mother--a forewarning of neurotic explosions to come.

In essence, however, the plot follows the old “Family Ties” twist. The mother was a flower child in the ‘60s. (Weinstock, like the character she plays, never lived with Haydn’s father, to whom she was married for 18 years.) Her daughter is the straight arrow who is sniffing around to make sure her mother isn’t smoking pot or slipping a little wine into the grape juice.

In the second act, Weinstock’s stand-up act alternates with her daughter’s letters and phone conversations from college.

Weinstock and Haydn are very talented and do some great bits in the show. Haydn’s violin solos are lovely. In Weinstock’s stand-up act (in the second act of “Molly & Maze”), it doesn’t take Molly long to figure out a way to set the Ten Commandments to a rap beat, to reveal her ambition “to go out with younger and younger men until finally I just go out with ideas” and to skewer her ex-husband, whom she describes as “so intense” that “he made Hitler look cranky. . . . He was the only man that Gandhi would have slapped.”

Still, bits--even good ones--do not a show make.

David Sanger directed, but without the ruthlessness or vision needed to find a focus for this overly long 2-hour, 25-minute piece. Another problem stems from the different skills of mother and daughter. Weinstock is a great comedienne, but a stilted actress. Haydn is a warm and natural actress, but not so talented as a comedienne.

One solution would seem superficially easy. Because Weinstock does not appear comfortable until she starts her nightclub scene in the second act, why not start with the nightclub act and move back and forth from that to “real” life?

But there is still the larger problem of figuring out what this show is trying to say. Weinstock wrote the show in 1988, shortly before her daughter went off to attend Brown University. So it began and ended with the difficulty of letting go.

But now Haydn, 22, has graduated and there is a new second act that doesn’t have a handle on the evolved mother/daughter relationship. There isn’t enough connection between Weinstock’s routines and Haydn’s messages home.

There is also a sense of mother and daughter skirting issues that might have truly tested their “Terms of Endearment”-like relationship. They do have a blow-up in the second act, but it is short, puzzling and disappears without any evident resolution.

The audience loved “Molly & Maze” on opening night, giving the show a standing ovation, a credit to the individual talents of Weinstock and Haydn.

But they still don’t have a show.

“MOLLY & MAZE”

In the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 4th Ave., San Diego. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 25. $22-$25; (619) 234-9583. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Lotus Weinstock: Molly

Lili Haydn: Maze

A Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company presentation. Director, David Sanger. Playwright, Lotus Weinstock, with Maze’s monologues in Act II by Lili Haydn. Sets, Amy Shock. Lighting, Tom Mays.