A Heck of an Opening

It’s pretty nervy of American Renegade Theatre to christen its comfortable, new North Hollywood complex with a show called “Theatre Hell,” inviting no end of sarcastic jokes in response.

Neither the play nor director Lois Weiss’ staging is like being in Hades. Rather, watching playwright Craig Alpaugh’s bumbling thespians try to put on a show makes us think of what a pain it must have been (and after four-plus years of delays) to put together the very theater we’re sitting in.

The complex consists of a 45-seat space, a 21-seat classroom and an amphitheater-like, steeply raked 99-seat main theater.

The play also makes us recall Michael Frayn’s backstage farce, “Noises Off,” where the “talent” is just about as awful but the results are much funnier than Alpaugh’s wildly uneven conception. Still, British ex-pat director Dickie Fennsworth (Colin Doty), faced with having to turn a ridiculously long (six hours, he estimates) mystery titled “Murder . . . It Hurts” into a show at the Pleasant Valley (Kansas) Community Theatre, must think at points that Frayn’s comedy is no longer a fiction.

Alpaugh doesn’t make it easy on his audience, concocting such a backbreaking, illogical setup to get the New York-based Dickie to Kansas in the first place that it takes the comedy a while to recover any momentum. Simply put, Dickie is under the thumb of Broadway producer Gregory Smuglee (a badly unfunny Bill Dearth) to do the impossible in Kansas as part of a deal to make a film about the “real America.”

The film element becomes quickly irrelevant (and not very well meshed into the action) as Dickie discovers a theater asylum run by the inmates, led by a fatuously arrogant drunk of an artistic director, Helen Vainer (Cynthia Frost, who captures the amateur theater impresario type to a T). Helen sees doing “Murder . . . It Hurts,” which happens to be written by Smuglee’s son and Helen’s nephew, Richard (Danny Lippin, amusingly uptight), as “a risk.” Dickie thinks it’s impossible, especially since Richard refuses to alter a word of his 23rd (!) draft.

The aimlessly endless script includes such characters as the playwright Arthur Miller, and one of Alpaugh’s funniest bits is Richard’s certainty that he can get Miller himself to play the role. It’s one sign of many to Dickie that he’s way deep into Amateurland, but it’s nothing next to a cast of hapless locals who think they can act.

Shelly Von Miserables (Kevin Quill, who hasn’t found a style with which to deliver the flamboyant role) is Pleasant Valley’s answer to Olivier, full of himself, forgetful of his lines, at war with everybody. Virginia (a shrill Deborah Adamson) cries at everything, and her boyfriend, Garth (a fine Paul Murray), isn’t psychologically much better, while local sexpot Gay (Jeanne Heileman, pouring on the breathiness) tries her charms on Dickie.

Even with all of this laid out, the comedy’s farcical nature never realizes its full potential as Alpaugh gets stuck in repetitive business with Dickie rehearsing his cast. Some complications that seem natural, like Dickie getting into a sticky situation with Gay, never happen. “Theatre Hell” ultimately feels like a farce in the making, in which some comic ideas get worked to death and others not at all.

Another major problem isn’t Alpaugh’s, but Weiss’, as she and set designer Barry Thompson seem unconcerned that they haven’t created anything like a working theater space on stage. There’s no effort made, for instance, to contrast Smuglee’s Manhattan office with the Pleasant Valley world. Fortunately, Doty takes much more care as Dickie, a bewildered fish-out-of-water character who’s as ideal a center of farce craziness as you could hope for.

BE THERE

“Theatre Hell,” American Renegade Theatre, 11136 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Runs indefinitely. $12-$15. (818) 763-1834. Running time: 2 hours.