THEATER REVIEW : Oliver Hailey’s ‘Round Trip’ Twists in a Circle of Turns

When they click, plays about actors in plays bring another mirror to the fun-house illusion that is theater. In “Noises Off,” for instance, Michael Frayn set the actors’ real and fictional lives careening off of each other to create dizzily elaborate comedy.

Neither dizzy nor elaborate, Oliver Hailey’s “Round Trip” at the Ventura Court Theatre follows three actors as they rehearse the touring version of a Broadway show, but their lives bear little, if any, relation to their characters.

What relation there is needs to be pointed out by Tom (Tom Troupe), the director, craggy-faced and wise, who dresses all in black like Gene Kelly in “Marjorie Morningstar.” He notes that his star, a bitchy Miss Know It All named Peggy (Wendie Malick), needs to play a likable character because, in real life, no one can stand her. That’s fine, but no one points out that Peggy’s character is not particularly likable.

In “Round Trip,” we see an awful lot of the play-within-a-play, a comedy that defies categorization--and not because it is wildly original. The plot centers on a West Texas couple whose precocious but dead daughter periodically walks her bike across stage, demonstrating that the girl is still alive in the minds of her parents.

The couple’s marriage is enlivened by the reappearance of another person from their past, this one alive. Played by an actor named Johnny (William Jones), he is an old school chum for whom the wife still carries a flame and who himself is in love with the husband.

The couple must sort out their feelings about their old chum’s homosexuality. As the husband (played by an actor named David, who is in turn played by Vaughn Armstrong), Armstrong is amusing as a provincial Texan surprised to find that he likes being the love object of his wife’s affections. But mostly the play within the play remains quaint and flat, a work that might have seemed mildly racy two decades ago.

As it is, we are asked to believe that their aimless almost-comedy has been a Broadway hit for two years running. (Hailey actually wrote three plays that each closed on Broadway after only one performance--now that might make an interesting play.)

*

“Round Trip” remained unproduced when the playwright died in 1993. His widow, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey (whose best-selling novel “A Woman of Independent Means” just aired on NBC) culled over her husband’s notes to produce the finished version on view at the Ventura Court.

Director Marcia Rodd could have supplied a snappier pace. As it is, we are left to linger in the pall of setups that fail to pay off. Wendie Malick is engaging as the high-strung actress whose husband and child have requested she take this road job. Tom Troupe seems saddled with the role of a kindly director who is given a quirk instead of a personality: When he gets upset, he starts to tap dance.

The playwright introduces major revelations--Peggy’s husband hits her, Johnny’s child has died, David is a compulsive philanderer--that never return to reverberate in the play-within-the play or in the play itself.

For that reason, “Round Trip” only goes nowhere and back.

“Round Trip,” Ventura Court Theatre, 12417 Ventura Court, Studio City, (213) 660-8587. Thur.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. Ends March 19. $17-$20.