‘Adjusting’ to New Career, Romance

Eugene Pack’s “Elinor Adjusting” at Theatre West is a sweet but innocuous play about a financially challenged widow who relocates to a college town, signs up for night computer classes and tries to forge a new life.

Elinor (Bridget Hanley), the widow in question, meets a cavalcade of semi-wacky characters on the road to independence: Cindy (Susan Morgenstern), a sales executive who gives Elinor a job at her fly-by-night vitamin company; Justine (Ellen Idelson), a flighty young sales rep with boy troubles; and Kirby (Steve O’Connor), Elinor’s college-age lab partner, who winds up competing with Elinor for a plum job. Somehow, we’re not at all surprised when Dempsey (Tom Dahlgren), the lonely divorce who takes Elinor on as his new roommate, finds himself falling hard for the tenacious widow. What will Elinor choose? Romance or career?

To his credit, Pack, who also directs, has assembled a uniformly sprightly cast, and the actors manage to greatly enliven their utterly predictable material. Hanley is dryly sympathetic as a senior scrabbling for a foothold in the new economy. Despite a belabored East Coast accent, Lee Meriwether strikes the right balance of clueless elitism and concern as a wealthy former acquaintance who runs into Elinor by chance at a mall. Languid and sardonic, Kirby captures the irritating but magnificent smugness of a privileged kid, as yet untried by the weary world, for whom all things are possible.

Morgenstern’s amusingly scattered character is a barracuda with a heart of gold who has been in the sales game a tad too long, while Idelson is hilarious as a self-absorbed young woman who could qualify for an Olympic heat in whining. But it is the twinkling, self-possessed Dahlgren, as Elinor’s forlorn and romantically rusty love interest, who works his way into Elinor’s heart--and steals a little piece of ours as well.

* “Elinor Adjusting,” Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends July 2. $15. (323) 851-7977. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.