THEATER REVIEW : Actors Alley’s ‘Audit’: Insipid Meeting of the Mindless

Actors Alley has had some bum luck lately, what with the quake damage to its new home at the El Portal Theater and all. That’s why it moved the play that would have reopened that landmark venue to Los Angeles Valley College. Unfortunately, Peter Lefcourt’s “The Audit” just adds to the woes.

An insipid little comedy about a bickering clan hovering in a New York hospital waiting room as the father/husband/son in their lives croaks from a coronary offstage, “The Audit” adds up to little more than stereotypical characters, pat confrontations and creaky plot mechanisms.

Myra, a.k.a. ex-wife No. 1 (Joan Benedict), arrives on the scene early. She’s bitter, surly, uptight and none too happy to see her ex-father-in-law, Sol (Elliott Goldwag). Ex-wife No. 2 (Linda Phillips)--the ditsy “bimbo”/”home-wrecker” and erstwhile Playboy pinup--trots in. Her name is Bambi . Need one say more?

Lenny’s kids also show: the resentful gay son Stephen (Joe Garcia) and his hostile sister Janey (Karen Reed). Later, the comparatively catatonic Margaret (Carolyn Field), who was Lenny’s last squeeze, joins the group.

Add to this meeting of the mindless one surly nurse (Cynthia Newton) and a distracted doctor (Gene Freedman) and you’ve got the setup. Unfortunately, you’ve got nearly the entire play as well, for there’s little surprise to come from these cardboard figures.

The recriminations fly throughout Act I, which ends with the announcement that Lenny has died. Occasioned by a fantasy “audit” that would give Lenny (Carl Strano) one last chance, Act II is told in short flashbacks, as each character gets to relive a past incident that shows what a lousy guy Lenny was.

He cheated on his first wife. He lied to his second. When he took his young son out to play ball in the park, he told Stephen that he threw “like a girl.” And so it goes. Lenny had a litany of bad deeds--but apparently not an original sin, so to speak, among them.

The worst part about “The Audit” isn’t that it bores us with moralistic truisms familiar from countless other sentimental plays and TV dramas, but that it obscures the talents it does employ.

The actors are stuck in one-dimensional roles, which means they end up merely playing their single notes off against each other. The result is, for the most part, simply dissonance.

Nonetheless, Goldwag manages to inject a surprising amount of humanity into Sol, and Phillips is also convincing. But most of the rest of the players fall victim to Lefcourt’s unctuous, if light, melodrama. And director Jeremiah Morris hasn’t thrown them a lifeline.

* “The Audit,” Horseshoe Theatre, Los Angeles Valley College, 5800 Fulton Ave., Van Nuys. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 & 7 p.m. Ends March 26. $18.-$15. (818) 508-4200. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.