The ‘Poison’ Lurking Below an Affluent Surface

This is too much freight for one little script to carry.

With the Mark Taper Forum inching, inching toward securing a second stage, our flagship nonprofit company finds itself in a largely dependent mode--dependent on pre-approved shows from other markets, heavy on touring projects and London and New York hits.

Automatically, when the Taper commits its resources to a full main stage production of a locally generated play, it’s way, way, way too big a deal. The situation carries with it a palpable “or else.” This thing better be good, or else. If it isn’t, who knows when the Taper (excluding the presently revived Taper, Too workshop program) will take a flier on another new local play?

Such is the harsh context greeting “The Poison Tree,” L.A.-based Robert Glaudini’s oddly flat La Jolla-set exercise, which opened Wednesday in an oddly flat production.

Taper producing director Robert Egan has overseen the development of Glaudini’s script all the way through the Taper pipeline. In a fabulous house on a fabulous hill in La Jolla, trouble’s brewing for Rockie Rogers (Anne Archer) and her husband, Ronald (Bob Gunton). Rockie is a soulful, “unstable” woman of a certain age with an exotic past: running around Paris with Jean-Paul Sartre, a previous marriage in Taos. Her son by that previous marriage became a heroin-related fatality at 29. A couple of years hence, Rockie mourns still.

Her husband is a relatively liberal La Jolla judge overseeing a lurid tabloid-stoked case involving a Pacific Beach surfer girl of privilege, on trial for murdering and mutilating three young men. With a federal judicial appointment in the offing, the pressure’s on Ronald to resolve this case satisfactorily, to appease the local bloodthirsty taste for justice.

Rockie, meantime, is spending more and more time with her poetry teacher, a hunky young UC San Diego prof (Christian Camargo) who goes by the name St. Gerude. (He won’t use his real name, we learn, “until there’s peace in the Balkans.”)

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The central scene is a party. The Rogerses’ callow friends gab about the Youth Problem and linguistics. St. Gerude brings a snake-wielding exotic dancer, Miss MM (Lola Glaudini, the playwright’s daughter). A bumpy night ensues, with much leering and various stolen kisses.

Rockie’s meant to be an intuitive free spirit amid all that corrosive La Jolla soullessness. Glaudini sets up a parallel between the murder case, hinging on unreasonable search and seizure of the murder suspect’s apartment, and Ronald poring over his wife’s poetry journal. At one point St. Gerude urges Rockie to dig deeper with her poetry, to “look inwardly . . . closely . . . under the surface of the banal.” Though Glaudini’s play predates the release of “American Beauty,” a similar facile exploration of moral hypocrisy runs through “The Poison Tree.” It’s a peculiar mixture of easy target-shooting (don’t those moneyed cliff dwellers hear themselves?) and rickety melodrama.

“The Poison Tree” is far more serious and high-minded than “The Claiming Race” and “The Identical Same Temptation,” two other recent (and far more promising) Glaudini plays. Problematically, Egan and company treat “The Poison Tree” like earnest comedy-drama realism, in the mode of “Dinner With Friends,” rather than subtly charged alternate-universe realism. Too often the actors simply mill around David Jenkins’ excellent indoor-outdoor setting, diffusing the impact of moment after moment. At its most tedious, the play makes you wonder if there isn’t something more compelling going on in one of those other cliff-side houses.

Archer gives Rockie a decent but monochromatic shot, falling into a rut of pouts and gee-willikers vocal inflections. Gunton brings considerable presence and that swell voice to the task, but he seems a little lost up there. Camargo does well enough, though Glaudini, Egan and the actor never establish how seriously or comically to take this poseur-poet.

In “The Claiming Race” and “The Identical Same Temptation,” you can hear more readily why so many L.A. theater-makers champion the longtime Southern Californian Glaudini. He has a way with dialogue with an obsessive undertow and a despairing edge, as well as a fierce interest in the ways people use other people, sometimes venally, sometimes unthinkingly. You just wouldn’t know it from “The Poison Tree.”

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* “The Poison Tree,” Mark Taper Forum, Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends July 16. $29-$42. (213) 680-4017. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Anne Archer: Rockie Rogers

Christian Camargo: St. Gerude

Bob Gunton: The Hon. Ronald S. Rogers

Randy Oglesby: Louis Castellan

Linda Gehringer: Rita Becker

Natsuko Ohama: Sylvia Castellan

Stanley Kamel: Kenneth Becker

Lola Glaudini: Miss MM

Written by Robert Glaudini. Directed by Robert Egan. Scenic design by David Jenkins. Costumes by Salvatore Salamone. Lighting by Michael Gilliam. Sound by Jon Gottlieb. Original music by Karl Fredrik Lundeberg. Production stage manager James T. McDermott.