THEATER REVIEW : Fantasy the High Point of Whining Play : Despite flashes of energy and nice casting, the drama is caught in the grip of the gripes.

Mama Sarah complains that daughter Laura can’t land the acting job that will bring in some cash, say $50,000. Laura complains that Mama doesn’t let up on her. Sarah complains that Laura’s husband is always pecking away at his computer and that no one is taking care of Laura’s 7-year-old son, Jonathan--whom Sarah still calls “the baby.” Laura complains that Mama doesn’t understand that her husband pecks away because he’s a writer, and besides, Jonathan is well-nurtured.

Oh, stop the squabbling.

That’s the almost unavoidable reaction to Robert Rudelson’s mother-daughter drama with the ungainly title “Who’s Looking After the Baby?” at the Whitefire Theatre. Most valuable as a model to playwrights-in-training on fundamental traps to avoid, the play can’t rise above the petty sniping that consumes so much of its dialogue, and misses the kind of archetypal conflict that could have raised the stakes.

It does venture a kind of magic realism involving the reappearing ghost of Sarah’s dead husband, Charlie, but the magic here is threadbare under Lelia Goldoni’s disappointingly slack direction, on a poverty-stricken set by William Wilday. Sarah, a seamstress before Charlie swept her off her feet and introduced her to the theater world, is the kind of woman who still owns chiffon. This isn’t the kind of world for the burlap-type scrim that dominates the set.

Because his present action places Sarah, who has fainted at an Italian-American festival, in a hospital bed with Laura tending to her needs, Rudelson forces himself into a corner. The mother-daughter story unwinds in the most contorted way imaginable, with halfheartedly envisioned dream scenes serving a functional expository role--including an embarrassing stab at Theatre of the Absurd in Act II. (As if to underline the idea, Laura remarks that she feels as if she’s in a Samuel Beckett play, though nothing in the exchanges suggests Beckett in the least.)

Actually, Erica Yohn, as aged, ailing Sarah slumped over in her hospital bed, looks like a Beckett character. But her despair contains no poetry, though Yohn is the life force on this stage, both weighted by regrets and past losses and brightened by the encounters with the (dead) man she loves. Janice Lynde, her cool Laura a nice casting opposite Yohn’s tough approach, has little to do but grouse and roll her eyes. Al D’Andrea’s Charlie is Mr. Suave in a double-breasted suit until he’s forced to get silly in Act II.

For a show whose only energy is in its fantasy, it’s a tad ironic that the message here is for one (namely Sarah) to drop one’s fantasies and deal with life head on. A rich fantasy life looks good after this.

Where and When

What: “Who’s Looking After the Baby?”

Location: Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays.

Price: $15.

Call: (818) 503-2323.