Indulging in Guilty Pleasures

Successful London publisher Simon Hench (Kevin Quinn) is well practiced in the old English maxim: Keep a stiff upper lip. On this summer day in 1975, domestic disturbances prevent him from listening to his new record of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” testing his emotional detachment from the squalid stuff called living.

Director Michael Rothhaar takes Simon Gray’s wicked “Otherwise Engaged,” and gives it vindictive bite with sophisticated flair in this exacting production at the Pacific Resident Theatre.

Simon is much more concerned about the taste of a dreadful nut cutlet, which his brother Stephen (Stuart W. Howard) just ate to curry favor with his betters, than the feelings and anxieties of those around him. In his robin-egg blue living room, he seeks sanctuary from the intrusions of the world.

The living room (designed by Victoria Profitt) is a stilted affair--functional but not comfortable or cozy. Simon is a connoisseur of black vinyl--carefully checking that this new Wagner record isn’t warped and cleaning the disc off methodically before he begins to play it.

He has a sense of entitlement, expressed with an annoying serenity. That might be boring, but Simon’s condescension has a streak of cruelty and he freely uses his wit to whip those around him.

His younger brother pops in to agonize over losing a promotion that hasn’t actually been lost except in the haze of his inferiority complex. Simon’s newspaper columnist friend, Jeff (Stephen Hoye), shows up to lambaste Australians and just about everyone else. A disheveled student (Frank Castrina), who lives upstairs, is bothersome even when he breathes. They all keep Simon from the solace of Wagner.

In Quinn’s Simon, flickers of emotion almost surface, only to be quickly submerged for the sake of serene civility. He barely blinks when faced with infidelity or the naked breasts of Jeff’s much younger, calculating girlfriend, Davina (Andi Carnick). Her seduction of Simon has the cool sophistication of a chess match between two masters, where sex is just a pawn easily forfeited.

Rothhaar deftly paces this bitchy bit of social savagery. The decision to make Quinn’s Simon devoid of sympathetic fuzziness sharpens Gray’s nearly plotless play. From Howard’s philandering lout to Carnick’s piranha of a girlfriend to Lawrence Arancio as Simon’s pathetic old classmate, all of them are an awful, yet familiar mix of humanity. Only Stacie Chaiken as Simon’s wife, Beth, seems to have an awakening integrity. Gray’s clever turns of phrase and Simon’s snideness are guilty pleasures.

BE THERE

“Otherwise Engaged,” Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd., Venice. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Jan. 16. $20-$22. (310) 822-8392. Running time: 2 hours.