‘Leo’ Rises and Stuns

You can bring a play to a theater company, but you can’t make it talk--unless you have the right actors. Director-actress Patricia Lee Willson has for some time wanted to bring Mark Stein’s sweet, brilliant play “At Long Last Leo” to her Los Angeles theater home, Group Repertory Theatre. Perhaps sensing that Group Rep required an artistic boost--which it did--Willson has finally got “Leo” on stage, and her current cast is at perfect pitch.

Leading the way is Arlan Boggs, an actor of uncommon depth who characterizes Stein’s highly unusual hero Leo as a guileless young all-American guy burdened with an extremely active brain. Imagine Matt Damon’s genius in “Good Will Hunting” mixed with Jimmy Stewart in his Frank Capra mode, and you get some sense of what Boggs has cooked up here.

Stein knows that Leo is a bit absurd, and Leo senses it, too, even admitting at one point that he must strike others as “a kook.” But he has nevertheless returned after a two-year absence to his family home in the Pacific Northwest (designer Jeff McLaughlin cleverly imagines the home as a cartoonish, pyramidal yellow abode) determined to talk with his clan about his 638-page book, which is about nothing less than reorganizing the world.

Leo stuns them all--Dad (Marius Mazmanian), his beloved mom (Willson), his frustrated sister Sheila (Madeleine Falk) and his would-be girlfriend Gloria (Jonna Ivin)--with his sheer force of personality and conviction. Mom, however, is Leo’s prized audience, and she thinks he’s been wasting his time on a book nobody will read (nobody here has had a chance to, since it arrived by mail just moments before Leo’s entrance). The curious mother-son dynamic is just one of the levels on which Stein’s play works surprising magic.

Like this show’s set, the play itself could have become a cartoon, but Stein--and Willson with a keen directorial ear--interlaces humanity through the absurdism, like Ionesco by way of O’Neill. Mazmanian’s Dad is a wonderful study in kindly parental confusion, torn between Leo’s passions and Mom’s depression (subtly intoned by Willson). The key, though, may be Ivin as Gloria, whose own slight physical change after a night with Leo suggests that Leo’s vision of change may have something to it--if only he’ll pause to see the woman standing in front of him.

BE THERE

“At Long Last Leo,” Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. ASL-signed performances, with deaf actress Antoinette Abbamonte in the role of Gloria and Amelia Norfleet as Gloria’s talking cat Priscilla, on March 12-14, 19-21, inspired by a ASL version at Santa Barbara’s Access Theatre in 1991. There is no cat in the non-ASL version. Ends March 27. $16. (818) 769-7529. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.