‘Dr. Franklin’ an Exercise in Future Schlock

If Rod Serling had been a “Saturday Night Live” staff writer, he might have come up with this: Let’s have Ben Franklin, who loved toying with lightning and time travel, zap himself into the 21st century and counsel the female president of the United States.

Tuned to a wacky comic pitch, this could work. Yet what writer P.J. Wylie has cooked up with “Dr. Franklin and Madam President,” at the Camino Real Playhouse, is an awkward comic omelet with ingredients from “Dr. Strangelove,” stiff history films made for the classroom and “Mad TV.” That’s a sense of the messy results here.

Franklin’s grandson Benny (Scott Haring) describes how old Ben (Jim McElenney) grows tired of the haggling during the Constitutional Convention of 1789 and goes home to play with his scientific toys. George Washington, played by Rikki Rozel as the ramrod stick-in-the-mud that Washington wasn’t, wants Ben back at the convention. Too late--the year 2089 has got him.

It’s 109 years after the Cold War has ended, and the old Russian bear is again playing nuclear war games--this time with U.S. President Sarah Jensen (Barbara Hollis). Jensen must also contend with a Joint Chiefs of Staff that thinks a woman can’t handle nuclear war.

Wylie has also included a JFK-era scenario, down to a Castro look-alike (Tony Grande). It could be fun to imagine the future, but the action is pure Bay of Pigs nostalgia, a strange choice. Director B.J. Scott and her design team of Kimberly Krone (costumes) and Joe LaMasa (set) don’t make it look like any future, either.

Old Ben’s reaction to technological advancements is oddly muted. The 300-year anachronism should also be a comic mainspring for the play, but it hardly makes any impact.

More energy is directed to the lame running gag that everyone thinks that the guy dressed up as Franklin is an actor. We really have to suspend disbelief that the misunderstood Franklin would be allowed into the White House. (How he gets in is where Wylie’s plot goes haywire.)

McElenney does what he can to inject some charm with his portly, broad-faced presence as Franklin, but he can’t rise above the wooden staging and dialogue that steadfastly refuses to be funny.

Oh, there’s accidentally funny stuff, as in the poor French, Russian and Spanish dialects. But a genuine satire blending history and politics is so far out of range here that we’d need a time machine to get to it.

BE THERE

“Dr. Franklin and Madam President,” Camino Real Playhouse, 31776 El Camino Real, San Juan Capistrano. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sunday. $10. (714) 489-8082. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.