Struggling to Follow ‘Mimi’s Guide’

Doris Baizley wrote “Mimi’s Guide” as the second installment in a trilogy. The first play, “My Rebel,” was produced in Los Angeles in 1989 and later rewritten as “Tears of Rage.”

But “Mimi’s Guide,” at the Fremont Centre Theatre, is a curious sequel. Baizley reinvents the central character, Mimi, giving her a different back-story. Two members of a Vietnam-era love triangle are reunited 26 years later. Although this production finds emotional heat in a new triangular configuration, the script is self-conscious and borders on melodramatic.

A loutish poet, Waterman (Michael Genovese), whose poetry collections are “guides” using Mimi’s experiences as their primary source, is a visiting lecturer at a Louisiana college. He brings along his “muse,” Mimi (Lauren Letherer), to a romantically run-down two-story writer’s residence (designed by Richard Scully).

Yet Mimi is also his caretaker. If he doesn’t want to teach a seminar or attend a book signing, she goes instead, smoothing out his life without receiving any academic acclaim for herself.

In a contrived cute-meet, a man whom Mimi mistakes for a student is really the associate professor, Robert (Ping Wu), who invited Waterman and who already worships her.

In the way of myths and grand novels, he happens to have been born on the day and in the place where her first boyfriend and Waterman’s best friend, Mike, died as a soldier in Vietnam.

In the beginning, director Virginia Morris creates a gentle teasing tension between the former lovers, but doesn’t sustain it as the younger poet woos and wins Mimi. This, along with the script, conspires for raw but disjointed performances.

Baizley writes passionately about the lingering effects of Vietnam. The questioning voice of Robert--a refugee success story--presents a different facet of America, challenging Waterman’s protest heroics and ideals. Yet the ending is meant as a tease, making this play incomplete without the third play and unsatisfying by itself.

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* “Mimi’s Guide,” Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3:30 p.m. Ends May 14. $15. (626) 441-5977. Running time: 2 hours.