A Few Unpopped Kernels in ‘Popcorn’

Here we have a tremendously mixed blessing.

Ben Elton is an English stand-up comic, novelist, playwright, sometime actor and former co-writer on Rowan Atkinson’s “Blackadder” TV series. His play “Popcorn” (1996), which Elton adapted from his own book, imagines two sexy young murderers paying an unwanted visit to the Hollywood director whom they idolize, a smug auteur behind the controversial, ultra-violent “Ordinary Americans.”

We can thank Oliver Stone’s thickheaded slab of hypocrisy, “Natural Born Killers,” for inspiring “Popcorn.” The play, now in its West Coast premiere at the El Portal Center for the Arts in North Hollywood, is a lively, unsteady mixture of satire and serial-killer melodrama. Not without its own hypocrisies, it nonetheless rates as several thousand times more interesting than Stone’s film.

We can thank El Portal for taking on a piece destined to ruffle a feather or two among the theater’s supporters. Director Jeremiah Morris, who saw and loved the play in its 1997 London incarnation, here stages the second American production.

We are not, however, getting a particularly good look at it here. This is a sluggish and uncertain staging. Elton’s dialogue reads quickly and often hilariously on the page. On the big El Portal stage, addled by the theater’s nagging acoustical drawbacks, it’s a thing of fits and starts.

Elton confines the action to the fab home (handsomely designed by Don Gruber) of director Bruce Delamitri (Maxwell Caulfield). He and his producer (Vasili Bogazianos) are selecting a film clip from their nominated opus for that evening’s Academy Awards telecast. Can we use the scene shot from the point of view of the female protagonist’s vagina? The producer thinks not. Censorship, the director cries.

Delamitri wins his Oscar, and in a brief acceptance speech--proof that Elton has a fine ear for show-biz crapulence--he tells the audience: “I stand here on legs of fire. . . . You are the wind beneath my wings--and I flap for you.”

*

Later that night, Delamitri returns to his home with a former Playboy centerfold (Maria Cina), only to find that his biggest fans have already arrived. They are Wayne (David Faustino) and Scout (Jill Marie Simon), fresh off their latest killing spree. They want Delamitri to take responsibility for making the movies he’s made, and for inspiring their own real-life slaughter. It just might hold up in court. . . .

In Act 2, a tense hostage situation (bullets fired, blood spilled) turns pretty gabby. As Wayne and Scout menace Delamitri, his estranged wife (Julie Cobb), their teenage daughter (Rosemary Morgan) and the ex-centerfold (Cina), the debate involving movie violence, real violence and insatiable media complicity grows increasingly static. Though Elton’s black-comic sensibility is quite sophisticated--compared to Stone’s, whose wouldn’t be?--”Popcorn” can’t resist falling into the “Natural Born Killers” trap of demonizing the killers’ victims, if only because they’re shallow Hollywood stereotypes.

Caulfield is miscast as the director. Surely this actor has met a few Delamitris in his time: Where’s the motor-mouth swagger, the whiplash fake sincerity, the wit in the smarm? He’s all smarm and no wit. Caulfield treats every new outrage and plot turn with the same disaffected air of, “Is that so?”

Pacing is a funny matter: Sometimes, five minutes added, unwarranted, to a play’s running time can feel like 50. Director Morris hasn’t leaned on his actors enough in terms of moving this thing at the right contrasting speeds. It’s paced as if we had two lives to live--one on our own, the other at this production.

At least we have Faustino’s Wayne (riffing on Woody Harrelson-isms big-time, effectively) and especially Simon’s classically white-trash Scout. These two work hard. They hear the rhythms in Elton’s writing. Everyone else struggles; even the between-scene transitions lack snap.

I may be extra-sensitive to these matters, since Elton writes with a lot of commas, which I tend to like. “Popcorn’s” premise is nothing new, but the script has real velocity. Why ignore it? (The first act of Elton’s “Gasping”--a 1990 big-business satire--has some of the best banter I’ve read in a long time.) It’ll be fascinating to see how Elton fares in the role of librettist: He wrote the book for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new soccer musical, “The Beautiful Game,” and one can only hope Elton’s sense of humor rubs off.

Writing, especially in comedy, must be treated like a musical score, with attention paid to tempo, dynamics, tonal contrasts. Without them . . . we get a writer’s “points,” but not the pop.

Meantime: Any writer who can slip in a noun as sterling as “slutlet” is OK with me.

* “Popcorn,” El Portal Center for the Arts, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 7 p.m.; Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 1. $25-$42. (818) 508-4200. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Vasili Bogazianos: Karl Brezner

Maxwell Caulfield: Bruce Delamitri

Rosemary Morgan: Velvet Delamitri

Julie Cobb: Farrah Delamitri

David Faustino: Wayne Hudson

Jill Marie Simon: Scout

Maria Cina: Brooke Daniels

Chrysa Freeman: Kirsten

Gabriel Cade: Bill

Written by Ben Elton. Directed by Jeremiah Morris. Scenic design by Don Gruber. Costumes by Pat Naderhoff. Lighting by Jim Moody. Sound by Steve Shaw. Production stage manager Dana Craig.