Theater Review : ‘Apple’ Lands With Some Aplomb but Also Some Thuds

Worst-case scenario: Your vital, funny mother begins to slip into a faraway world of degenerative brain disease and your father promptly ditches her for a tacky woman he picks up in Miami at a luncheon-lecture on gingivitis. Best thing that can come of it: The hunky, compassionate doctor treating your mother falls in love with you, eventually taking you away from your stimulating but stressful life as a producer of hit sitcoms and he discovers a cure for Alzheimer’s.

Wow. That’s a pretty good deal.

Trish Vradenburg’s “And the Apple Doesn’t Fall . . . “ often feels like a writer’s exercise in wish-fulfillment, even if it does tackle a difficult subject with humor, or, at least, with wise-cracking. The show, which had its premiere Thursday at the Tiffany Theatre as prelude to an April Broadway opening, features a truly wonderful performance from Florence Stanley as Selma Griswald, the doting mom with a perfect deadpan who gets swallowed up by the oblivion of Alzheimer’s disease (her deadpan is the last thing to go). Once stricken, Stanley’s Selma looks out from her terrifying fog toward her beloved daughter Kate (Margaret Whitton) with childlike suppliance. In these scenes, Stanley is heart-rending.

This is a play about a family of quippers, and some of Vradenburg’s quips are quite funny. But the play is completely overshadowed by the heavy-handed mechanics of Vradenburg’s story, in which Kate loses her mother to oblivion only to get her back temporarily, thanks to a miracle drug developed by the handsome doctor (Richard Cox). The doctor’s name--Sam Grannett--sounds suspiciously like a character in the kind of high-brow romance novel this play sometimes resembles.

“That is one very, very special lady,” Dr. Grannett says to Kate of her mother. He is Mr. Right from the 1950s with a patina of post-feminist pop psychology. Naturally, Kate succumbs to Dr. Grannett’s charms and they fall in love. But when Selma goes against Dr. Grannett’s wishes, the once-perfect doctor unaccountably holds Kate responsible. When it’s convenient for the plot, the lovers make up, with Dr. Grannett once again assuming his role as a living dreamboat. He tells Kate, “I have decided to stop punishing you on the theory that cutting you out emotionally has made my life an unbearable hell.”

Even worse is a second-act scene, in which Selma flies to California to seek out Morton Seligman, the writing teacher who once told her she had promise, just before she became a wife and mother. Seligman, who is now a sold-out Hollywood screenwriter, not only remembers Selma, but can quote verbatim passages from a paper she wrote for him 35 years ago. Further, one of the great regrets of his mismanaged life is that he hadn’t had the courage to give her more encouragement. They dance. Stan Lachow seems to have completely given up on how to make Morton Seligman believable; he walks through the part as if counting the minutes till he can go home.

Under the direction of Leonard Nimoy, the other actors display a lot of confidence, not always a good thing. Margaret Whitton could use more self-doubt as Kate, the tough-as-nails career gal who always says what’s on her mind and always seems pleased with her own effectiveness. The fact that she seems to have no depth beneath her wisecracking surface makes this character quite wearing. Lee Wallace is amusingly buffoonish as Selma’s deserter husband Jack; Madeline Miller has one good moment of nervous laughter as his new bride. Janet Sarno as an obnoxious actress and Cox as Grannett are both unobjectionable.

The “Flowers for Algernon” twist in the plot produces one solid second-act scene, when the renewed Selma shows up at the wedding of her ex-husband to put him and his bride in their place for their shabby behavior. Vradenburg gets the comic and psychic payoff here that eludes her elsewhere.

Largely, though, “The Apple” gives one the squeamish feeling of listening to someone who has mistaken their wish-fulfillment fantasies for insight. Selma comes back from her Alzheimer’s just long enough to tell Kate, “No daughter has ever been loved as much as you are” and to write a No. 1 best-selling book that “tells the world the truth about the disease.”

Well, if you’re writing a fantasy, why not?

* “The Apple Doesn’t Fall . . . ,” Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursday-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. Closes March 24. $27. (310) 289-2999. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.