‘Mary, Mary’ Too Contrary for ‘90s Update

Author Jean Kerr once quipped that marrying a man is like buying something you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house.

Kerr is full of such quips, and she uses them hungrily in her late-1950s comedy hit, “Mary, Mary,” being revived by the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble in Fullerton.

“Mary” is about what happens when two people have married each other, seen that they don’t go with the house, part ways and, through amazing coincidences, get back together.

On Broadway in its prime, the play probably felt hip yet likable--acknowledging divorce and spoofing randy movie stars and what were then called “health nuts,” while finishing with a Shakespearean sense of satisfaction when the lovers get paired up properly.

Now, “Mary” seems quaint at best, and stuffed with highly dubious storytelling at worst. The laugh factor alone has seriously dropped from the time when this comedy was both running on Broadway and on movie screens starring Debbie Reynolds.

The problem now is that director Elisabeth Graham and her cast--despite a surface updating to the 1990s and name-dropping everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Michael Eisner--fail to pump any needed energy into the material, leaving a trail of wan half-chuckles and displaying a puzzling lack of chemistry.

Kerr plots her play like a kid who quadruple-knots her shoes when one knot would do.

The always-perplexed Bob, a San Francisco-based publisher (Tim Haldeman), is a mere weeks away from finalizing his divorce from Mary (Paulette Kendall, who has a passing resemblance to Reynolds) and marrying chipper Tiffany (Sandra Rae Eberhardt), who’s making sure Bob gets his minerals, vitamins and dried apricots.

Bob’s pal and tax guy, Oscar (Jeff R. W. Stevens), is handling his 1997 tax audit and has asked Mary (without telling Bob beforehand) to fly down from her Seattle home to explain some of the receipts.

At the same time, Dirk, Bob’s former Oxford classmate and now a movie star (Bryan Jennings), has moved into Bob’s building and wants Bob to publish his tell-all book, which, when read out loud, sounds suspiciously like a piece of prose by Jean Kerr.

During a storytelling stretch when Kerr’s comedy becomes more about tax accounting than male-female wars, Dirk takes a jesting offer by Bob seriously, and begins to woo the just-arrived Mary.

Three-act plays like this one often suffer a lag in Act II, but seldom like this one does, when through a series of ultra-contorted plot devices, Bob, Dirk and Mary end up uncomfortably together in Bob’s place at 1:30 a.m.

Act III is set with a farcical tone, which this cast is least able to do.

Haldeman the actor, for example, confuses being drunk with being in a stupor from accidentally taking sleeping pills instead of Tiffany’s vitamins.

Kendall’s Mary doesn’t fully deliver the acidic displays of wit early on that are Kerr hallmarks (and the very thing that drove Bob away in the first place). Later, Kendall doesn’t effectively convey Mary’s revelation of her true heart. Material and performance thus seem doubly unconvincing--not a good combination for a supposedly smart comedy about marriage.

Besides, since “Mary, Mary,” we’ve had smarter, funnier observers of marrieds, such as Alan Ayckbourn and Woody Allen, who neither sweated the plot details (Ayckbourn’s comedies are human, but they’re precise as little machines) nor the laughs.

*

Theater history is full of once-popular, once-acclaimed works that are seldom if ever revived. “Mary, Mary,” for all intents and purposes, should be one of them.

As always at the Vanguard, the production values are in place, from Dave Temple’s urban apartment set to Caitlin Guyan’s lights, which subtly suggest night and day.

Less typical is the uneven casting, from a suave but rote-sounding Jennings to the relaxed, engaging manner of both Eberhardt and Stevens.

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* “Mary, Mary,” Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, 699A S. State College Blvd., Fullerton. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 5 p.m. Sunday, 2 p.m. matinee July 17. $15-$19. Ends July 24. (714) 526-8007. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Tim Haldeman: Bob

Paulette Kendall: Mary

Bryan Jennings: Dirk

Sandra Rae Eberhardt: Tiffany

Jeff R.W. Stevens: Oscar

A Vanguard Theatre Ensemble production of Jean Kerr’s comedy. Director: Elisabeth Graham. Lights: Caitlin Guyan. Set and costumes: Dave Temple. Stage manager: Robert Eaton.