Theater Reviews : Too Early for ‘Dinner’ : Student Actors Just Aren’t Ready to Take On the Kaufman-Hart Class-and-Manners Comedy

Way back when, our high school drama class set out to do “Fiddler on the Roof,” and someone asked how we could do it, considering that the central role of Tevye is a tad older than 16 or 17.

Don’t worry, our teacher assured us. This isn’t a college show, where you can’t get away with playing dress-up. Here, she said, you can.

Alas, at Southern California College’s Center for the Dramatic Arts, they’re playing dress-up in a revival of Moss Hart’s and George S. Kaufman’s comedy “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”

Like “Fiddler’s” Tevye, the center of this play’s universe is so dominant, so fundamental that any playing around with the hoary man who came to dinner himself, Sheridan Whiteside, is toying with disaster.

So while many, many problems trouble director Morris Pike’s staging, the overwhelming one is simply that Rich Marting is much too young to play Whiteside. Marting tries very hard to sound the right gruff tone, deliver the deliciously acerbic lines with the right amount of bile and assume a pose of the right balance of put-upon disgust and imperiousness.

But it’s still dress-up time. Moss and Kaufman place New Yorker sophisticate and radio personality Whiteside, modeled on the urbane wit, Alexander Woolcott, in the quiet town of Mesalia, Ohio, where he’s arrived on a lecture tour.

Always at his side is his loyal, do-everything secretary, Maggie (JoAnne Wade); so are Whiteside’s hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest W. Stanley (Chris Sheets and Danielle Vinson).

But when Whiteside slips and falls and seemingly breaks his hip, the Stanleys are no longer hosts; they’re prisoners in their own house, taken over by the Caesar-like Whiteside, who takes command of the living room as the nexus of his worldwide social network.

Whiteside, though, comes up against the limits of his own power as Maggie falls in love with Bert (James L. Young), the local paper’s owner and main reporter , and announces she’s leaving Whiteside.

The plot complications are sometimes too much for even Hart’s and Kaufman’s dexterity, but they all come across clearly enough in Pike’s smooth staging.

*

Given the limits of the center’s ungainly wide stage (the college is trying--wisely--to raise funds to build another theater), Robert Wyatt’s living-room set thoroughly suggests the Stanleys’ upper-class aspirations trapped in Midwestern bourgeois values.

Important, since class and manners are everything in this comedic clash of the high-society set and small-town folk. But a good set only provides a frame, while the actors provide the flesh.

With a few exceptions, the student actors here neither comprehend the classes nor the manners. And in a real way, it’s not their fault: “The Man Who Came to Dinner” is really the province of seasoned companies, and never a good choice for students learning as they play.

It begins and ends with Marting, and while you can’t expect the G.B. Shaw-like imperial bluster of Monty Woolley (he of the original Broadway and film versions, the latter now on video), you do expect a willfully eccentric demon with a well-hidden kind heart.

Marting doesn’t use Whiteside’s wheelchair like the throne it should be, and he adopts only a series of poses without letting us in on the old man’s inner contradictions.

Oddly, while the film version’s only bad performance was Richard Travis’ Bert, the one winning turn here is from Young as Bert: This is an engaging, fresh-scrubbed, funny portrait of youthful ambition.

We can see how Wade’s Maggie would go for this guy, although Wade herself is so vocally flat that she never catches the music, nor the fire, of the dialogue.

Matt Newman and April Joy Peterson, as the Stanleys’ rebelling son and daughter, are blessed in this cast to be able to play people close to their own age; elsewhere, the age difference is such an insurmountable problem that you can only feel for the students.

College is tough enough without this.

* “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” Southern California College’s Center for the Dramatic Arts, 55 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m. $7. (714) 556-3610, ext. 243. Running time: 2 hours, 55 minutes. Rich Marting Sheridan Whiteside

JoAnne Wade: Maggie Cutler

James L. Young: Bert Jefferson

Kathleen Ackerman: Lorraine Sheldon

Chris Sheets: Ernest W. Stanley

Danielle Vinson: Mrs. Stanley

Matt Newman: Richard Stanley

April Joy Peterson: June Stanley

Jay Clark: Beverly Carlton

Jon Hayashi: Banjo

A Southern California College production of the Moss Hart-George S. Kaufman comedy. Directed by Morris Pike. Set design: Robert Wyatt. Lights: Chris Sheets. Costumes: Deanna Routon and Danielle Vinson.