THEATER REVIEW : Baitz’s ‘End of the Day’ Forgets to Say Good Morning

The title of Jon Robin Baitz’s play at the Coast Playhouse, “The End of the Day,” sounds elegiac, meditative. Forget all that. It’s a bitter little cartoon that evokes sharp, sour laughter but stops short of any fresh insights.

Baitz aims his barbs at Los Angeles in the first act and London in the second. He sees both societies as rotting, venal, corrupt. He makes his point early and keeps repeating it.

His caricatures wisecrack their way through an outlandish plot. At its center is Graydon Massey (D. W. Moffett), who fled London as a young man and landed in Malibu. He married into a wealthy Beverly Hills family, who paid for his medical practice. In the first scene, set in 1988, he rehearses his tribute to America, which he’ll speak at a brunch in honor of his new citizenship.

Even in this brief, supposedly hopeful scene, it’s clear that Massey’s primary interest is America’s plenty. Here, he notes, you can always go back for seconds. Then, before we’ve hardly glanced at anyone’s illusions, the play jumps ahead to 1994, when everyone has lost them.

Massey’s psychiatric practice in Beverly Hills is kaput, for reasons that are never adequately explained (he says he almost lost his license). He loathes his new job as an epidemiologist at a county-funded clinic in San Pedro.

There, he’s besieged by his ex-father-in-law and his ex-wife, a patient who believes he’s dying of AIDS, a formerly idealistic classmate who now smuggles cocaine, and the clinic’s tough administrator. They all make demands--some of them for lots of cash.

Massey hops back to London to see what he can finagle out of his grotesque family. With one exception, the same actors who played Massey’s supplicants in San Pedro now play his potential British benefactors and their servant. The one exception is the actor who played Massey’s patient in San Pedro. He now plays the young pre-California Massey in a brief daydream by the older Massey, who takes the role of his own deceased father in the same dream--the weakest scene in the play.

Then the action lurches back to Los Angeles, as everyone becomes tied together in a multinational conspiracy. Finally, the American and British characters mingle in the same room at an event that sounds--probably inadvertently--as if Baitz were satirizing the UK/LA Festival.

At the Coast, Ian Falconer designed a simple, immaculate stage, highlighted by a few askew angles, cool lighting by Michael Gilliam, and amusing knock-offs of contemporary art in the London scene. Don’t look for grunge in the San Pedro clinic. Presumably the intent was to establish how artificial it all is, so we can take it as satire and leave it at that.

There are some wicked, funny moments, performed to the hilt in David Warren’s staging. Moffett alternates masterfully between snippy venom and sad irony. Although Eve Gordon looks too fresh-faced to be the survivor of a rocky 10-year marriage, she seizes every possible laugh out of her exasperating talk with her ex-husband, then becomes an even more acquisitive English aristocrat with equal aplomb (though without as many good lines).

Larry Brandenburg does sterling double duty as Massey’s growling father-in-law and his alcoholic stepfather. Christina Pickles rips through two tough women, both of whom enjoy good fights, despite radically different accents. Patrick Kerr swoops across the stage as the desperate cocaine dealer, then totters across it as an ancient English servant.

Finally, as Massey’s patient, Neil Patrick Harris takes the play’s few moments of gravity (underlined here with added lines about a death wish) and hushes the laugh track, ever so briefly. His quick second act appearance isn’t as successful.

In a couple of interviews, Baitz said he has rewritten the play extensively since its 1992 New York production, but a reading of the New York text reveals that most of his alterations are a line here, a line there. Jokes have been freshened with topical references. But some of them still sound snide or strained, such as the lines about exotic California eating habits. To quote a line from the play, Baitz is “teasing his lessers.”

The basic problem remains: For the sake of its own dramatic momentum, “The End of the Day” focuses too much attention on ends, not enough on beginnings.

* “The End of the Day,” Coast Playhouse, 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Wednesdays-Fridays, Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 7 and 10 p.m. Ends April 24. $20-$25. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.