And Silly ‘Timing’ Is Had by All

The sign beside the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble’s box-office window should be your first clue: “There is mature language and bizarre situations in ‘All in the Timing.’ ”

“Bizarre” is an understatement. These six short plays by David Ives mess around with the time / space continuum, rewinding time, stopping it altogether or shifting it into a wacky parallel universe. They eavesdrop on talking chimps, enmesh minimalist composer Philip Glass in a Glass-like mini opera and visit Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky on the day of his assassination as he calmly walks around with a bloody ax embedded in his skull.

Yet while these playlets bear the guise of arty sophistication, they are plain silly at their best, sophomoric at their worst.

Ives’ collection has become one of the most produced shows in America, having been rushed onto stages everywhere since a much-talked-about off-Broadway presentation in 1994. Yet “All in the Timing” is a show you love as much as you hate, leaving you stranded in the nowhere in between.

At a recent performance, the audience greeted much of the material with strained smiles and scattered laughs. Hearty applause at evening’s end seemed mostly for director Wade Williamson and his actors--for when this production scores, it does so largely because of their work.

Ives suggests that, from relationships to art, success is all in the timing.

In “Sure Thing,” a man (Donald Formaneck) attempts to wrangle a date with a woman (Valerie Aronson) who sits alone at a coffeehouse. Each time their encounter veers in a bad direction, a bell rings, and time rewinds to give them another chance. This device wears thin, but Ives has enough sense to keep the piece short.

In perhaps the sweetest piece, “The Universal Language,” a woman with a mild stutter (Marcia Bonnitz) inquires about language lessons. She wants to adopt a new tongue because people laugh when she speaks English, but what she learns from the booming, infectiously boisterous instructor (David Morgan) is the unspoken language of sympathetic hearts.

This viewer’s favorite was a dud with the rest of the audience: “Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread,” in which mundane conversations in a bakery are deconstructed, reconstructed and repeated with slight variations in a mini Glass-like opera.

Conversely, the audience favored a piece that yours truly didn’t much like: “The Philadelphia,” in which people’s moods are named after American cities--a cross-country string of potshots.

The actors are top-notch, with Morgan coming off best, whether as the language teacher, Trotsky or a talking, typewriter-pounding chimp.

BE THERE

“All in the Timing,” Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, 699-A S. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 5 p.m. Ends Feb. 14. (714) 526-8007. $13-$15. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.