‘Party’: Texas-Size Romantic Woes

In Brady Sewell Thomas’ “Slumber Party,” at the Road Theatre, an ailing Texas lawyer’s romantic weekend with a long-lost love gets rudely interrupted by a Texas norther--not to mention the unexpected arrival of his two ex-wives and alcoholic daughter.

Unlike Thomas’ funnier and more fully fleshed-out “The Chisholm Trail Went Through Here,” which the Road produced in 1994, this character-driven vehicle takes a shortcut through overly familiar terrain.

Taylor Gilbert, who meticulously directed last season’s award-winning “Homefires,” fails to give this promising but undeveloped play the necessary mortar of the small but telling detail. The same could be said of the performers, who play their broad characters--a strident mantrap (Carol Keis), a blue-stocking spinster (Ann Gillespie), a nubile sex kitten (Marci Hill) and a boozy daddy’s girl (Amy Buffington)--amusingly but obviously. The exception is Patrick James Clarke, who plays the ambivalently rendered protagonist of the piece as the crow flies--straight and true.

For all its faults, “Party” still packs a walloping theme. As in her earlier work, Thomas once again affirms, with a wit as bleak as the landscape, that everything is bigger in Texas--including the spectacular peccadilloes and moral malaise of those hardscrabble individualists whose only remaining frontiers are the next unopened bottle and the nearest untried bed.

* “Slumber Party,” 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 20. $15. (818) 761-8838. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.