A ‘Bette and Boo’ That’s Missing Durang’s Guts

Suddenly, Christopher Durang, who’s been dormant too long, is busting out all over. South Coast Repertory’s current anthology, “A Mess of Plays by Chris Durang,” suggests that Durang has only seemed to be inactive.

Now, Chapman University is offering a modest revival of an early Durang stink bomb tossed into the midst of proper theater, “The Marriage of Bette and Boo.”

The program notes quote Durang defending his play as not being “too angry.” It’s a little below Durang, who has never built his playwriting career on moderation. The man’s a provocateur, lampooning matrimony, the Catholic Church and other hallowed traditions, but with a point.

“Bette and Boo” has a collegiate’s smart and smirky attitude about it (he first wrote it in 1974 while still at Yale); angry or not, it’s mercilessly bitter about how far people fall short of expectations.

Director Ron Thronson’s staging and his cast aren’t as merciless as they need to be, however, and this very black comedy is rather shaded in grays here. It doesn’t shake us up the way it should.

One obstacle you feel this cast never quite surmounts is the fact that Durang loathes all of his characters, save for Matt (Erik Peterson), the college-educated son of Bette and Boo (Kristen McCreanor and Sean Cox), and the play’s droll narrator.

Durang’s loathing is what some don’t like about him, but you play the hand you’re dealt. The best productions of this or other Durang black comedies have the actors projecting sadness, loss and tragedy onto Durang’s hard, ironic surface. (The same rule works for Brecht.)

Without this actorly tension, you end up with a pretty cold fish. Bette wants lots of children, but Boo, drinking more and more, doesn’t really have his heart into it--or anything else. Bette gets pregnant, but except for Matt, her babies are stillborn.

Bette’s determination seems mad, but no madder than that of anyone around her: her crazy sister, Emily (Courtney Dickerson); her bitchy sister, Joan (Amy Lawson); her mother (Brande Belanger), who’s only happy when her grown children are living with her; her father (Anthony Powell), who speaks only in various grunts and suppressed screams.

Then there’s Boo’s terrifying clan of father Karl (Michael Gene Brown), a diabolical patriarch with an endless supply of cutting insults, and his utterly cowed and ditzy mother (Heather Persinger).

On paper, this sounds depressingly sad and worse; in the play, it’s acidly funny. Where another playwright would milk the stillbirths for sentiment, for example, Durang has the doctor drop the wrapped corpse on the floor like yesterday’s newspaper. “Bette and Boo” was Durang’s first experiment in subverting the old rules of American family tragedies on stage, and it remains a brilliant first step.

This production, though, isn’t quite gutsy enough to go all the way with Durang’s subversion. Exceptions are Brown, dripping haughty evil as Boo’s father, and Dickerson, who movingly imposes her own expression of a collapsing personality.

*

As Bette, McCreanor has a funny core but doesn’t give us all of this woman’s warring desires, while Cox’s Boo is too passive for us to care very much.

As shown by the black absurdism of Ionesco (a huge influence on Durang), caring is important: With it, the skewering comedy has a point; without it, the skewering just leaves blood.

“Bette and Boo” isn’t about tossing marriage into the landfill, but about what happens when a husband and wife never listen to each other, and the consequences that brings.

Helped along by Ron Coffman’s shifting light scheme and Craig Brown’s simple set dominated by a giant marriage contract, this production could take us to deeper, and thus funnier, places.

* “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” Chapman University, Studio Theatre in the Moulton Center, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends Saturday. $5-$7. (714) 997-6812. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

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“The Marriage of Bette and Boo

Kristen McCreanor: Bette

Sean Cox: Boo

Erik Peterson: Matt

Brande Belanger: Margaret

Anthony Powell: Paul

Amy Lawson: Joan

Courtney Dickerson: Emily

Michael Gene Brown: Karl

Heather Persinger: Soot

Robert E. Harrison: Father Donnally/Doctor

A Chapman theater and dance department production of Christopher Durang’s black comedy. Directed by Ron Thronson. Set: Craig Brown. Lights: Ron Coffman. Costumes: S.E.J. Jorgensen.