Building on Collapsing Marriages

It’s almost perverse that a man as happily married as the late playwright Oliver Hailey, who lived many years in a bucolic Sherman Oaks home with author-wife Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, wrote a comedy like “Father’s Day” about a nest of cynical and nearly cynical divorcees living in a Manhattan co-op building.

With three decades’ distance between the play’s birth at the Mark Taper Forum and now, at Group Repertory Theatre, Hailey’s mastery of the artfully glib line and of a seriocomic tone and structure is clear. It puts him in the ballpark with Alan Ayckbourn, another observer of collapsing marriages.

Just as clear under Malcolm Atterbury Jr.’s direction is that “Father’s Day” requires a sharp, smart cast to put across its Noel Coward-esque humor, but this revival only partly succeeds.

This is the kind of comedy that epitomizes what Variety, the show-biz trade paper, would term “pro.” With Ayckbourn’s mathematical precision, Hailey presents his three divorced women after a Father’s Day party in Act I, followed by the men in Act II, ending back where he began, with the three women comparing themselves to Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.”

We don’t hear Chekhov’s quietly melancholy tone, though. From the start, led by Diana Angelina’s bitchy, brassy Louise, the tone is more loud New Yorker. Louise thinks all men are louses, but hostess Estelle (Julie Davis) is more innocently willing to give her ex, Harold (Doug Engalla), a second chance, especially since they have twin boys.

Intellectually leaning Marion (Meia Carr), for her part, is actually spending more time in bed with her former hubby, Richard (Christopher Winfield), than when they were married.

Louise is one of those characters on whom a playwright hitches his star: She’s the center of attention, an audience-pleaser and much too funny and cynical not to be concealing a truckload of pain. Angelina is wonderful as Louise when the job is spewing witty rejoinders (her divorced Tom is now married to “The Fat One”) and rocking Estelle’s innocence. She is less able, though, to put across Louise’s pain (ex-husband Tom and their son are moving to Iowa), and she has an ugly tendency to just spew hate. From being the center of attention, Louise becomes someone you wish would just shut up.

Estelle and Marion are more shaded characters whom Davis and Carr clearly care about but can’t make as commanding in their own ways as Louise. Estelle has perhaps the play’s most touching monologue as she recalls growing up an orphan and infiltrating a large family without the parents’ noticing. Her desire to have and keep a family is intense on the page, but it’s lessened considerably on the stage. Carr’s Marion at first comes off as oddly forced, but calms down for some rewarding touches of irony in Act II.

Atterbury’s staging is smooth and confident, if not inspired, but it only comes to crackling life when Winfield’s Richard strides across the co-op balcony and delivers the play’s full comic potential with brilliant timing (“I love class in bed sometimes”). Engalla’s Harold is amusing when reacting with horror to Richard’s cool revelation that he’s bisexual, but less believable when he explains himself, which Hailey has his characters do too much.

Maurice DiMino’s Tom is a bit too bland ever to allow us to see how in the world he was ever married to Louise, who wouldn’t know bland if she stared at it.

In an impressive double-play, Atterbury also designed the fine balcony set with its suggestion of lives hanging in the balance and of a much larger world than that of this squabbling sextet.

The show’s textual updates, with references to AIDS, Kenneth Starr and Costco, are clever, but other references to “Oh Calcutta!” and a Gloria Steinem-led feminist movement date an otherwise universal comedy.

BE THERE

“Father’s Day,” Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 4 p.m. Ends Oct. 30. $16. (818) 769-7529. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.