Smooth Staging Helps Inconsistent ‘Puritans’

Director David P. Moore and a talented company essay Joshua Rebell’s deeply flawed comedy “Preying on Puritans,” by the Sacred Fools Theater at the Heliotrope, as if they were interpreting vintage Noel Coward, earning high marks for style if not substance.

The play revolves around an elite group of New York sophisticates trying to pass off a deceased writer’s masterwork--a Colonial-era love story--as their own. Using a pretty actress pal as “bait,” the conspirators recruit a hapless high school history teacher to front their felonious endeavor.

The nihilistic baddies gloat over their as-yet-unpublished manuscript as if it were the lost treasure of El Dorado, a sure guarantee of riches for all. And when the vestigially moral characters--the actress and the teacher--bemoan their involvement in the scheme, they are fed lines like, “You don’t have a choice” and “It’s too late”--even though it’s obviously not too late and a simple “no” would extricate them from their difficulties.

Despite its flagrant inconsistencies, Rebell’s piece remains eminently watchable in this smooth staging. Still, when Grant, the teacher, played by a game Andrew Friedman, laments, “I gave you people my name and for the life of me I don’t know why,” we want to clue him in on an obvious secret: Neither do we.

*

* “Preying on Puritans,” Heliotrope Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive, Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 13. $10. (310) 281-8337. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.