‘Bad Habits’ Best Left Forgotten

Sanitariums, like prisons, might seem like natural settings for plays, considering they provide larger-than-life characters and built-in conflicts and nobody is really going anywhere.

Novelist Don DeLillo understood this with his only play, the woefully underappreciated and under-revived “The Day Room.” A few years before DeLillo’s surreal escapade in 1974, playwright Terrence McNally--who had yet to break out with such hits as “The Ritz” and “Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune”--tried his hand at a sanitarium play with “Bad Habits.”

Unlike “The Day Room,” “Bad Habits” is best left unrevived, as we’re reminded in a co-production by the Celtic Art Center and the Sarah Fulton Group at Theatre Unlimited.

As with his mature work, McNally blends wild comedy with serious intents, but here the blend becomes fairly rancid. The ill-fitting structure of “Bad Habits” underscores this point, with the funnier first half set in the lighthearted Ravenswood sanitarium followed by the more dour and tedious climes of Dunelawn sanitarium.

Ravenswood’s therapy is a talky admixture of Freudian and humanist psychology, while Dunelawn’s approach is to plug patients full of sedatives.

The halves contrast but do not comment on each other, leaving the audience with a sense that the playwright is aimlessly experimenting with absurdism.

Whatever comedy is in “Bad Habits” runs along the lines of naming the head of Ravenswood Dr. Pepper (Zale Morris) and the Dunelawn nurses Benson and Hedges (Christina Miles and Kristin Charney). Pepper, who has his own problems (thunderstorms make him scream because he has a metal plate in his head), is treating slightly deranged Harry Scupp (Tim Byron Owen), whose wife, Dolly (Alice Manning), is visiting to see how things are going.

Lots of rambling exchanges ensue, interrupted by spatting actor couple April (Eden Cooper Sage, replacing Rachel Bailit) and Roy Pitt (Anthony Garrett) and spatting moneyed gay couple Hiram and Francis (Paul Jerome and Sean Fallon Walsh. Preston Spickler, an actor whose name McNally might have invented, injects some comic menace as a Nazi-like German waiter-aide to Dr. Pepper.

None of this amounts to anything, but under Phil Ramuno’s direction it passes the time, which is more than you can say for the second half at Dunelawn.

McNally’s plays are seldom tedious, but this section is a painful exercise in static nonsense that never seems to end. This time, Spickler plays the head doctor, Toynbee, worshiped by both Benson and Hedges even though he speaks only in inexplicable mumblings.

Benson’s world is upturned when her ex-husband (Walsh) is admitted as a patient, while Hedges overcomes her shyness by running off with the randy aide Bruno (Garrett).

Nothing in this world is as startling or sharp-edged as it may have seemed in 1974, and Barry Lynch’s direction does little to fine-tune the flat, overextended material.

The best we get here are some extremely apt casting choices, including Miles as Benson and Spickler in both roles.

“Bad Habits,” Theatre Unlimited, 10943 Camarillo St., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays 8 p.m.; Sundays 7 p.m. Ends June 20. $15. (323) 462-6844. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.