Long on Words but Short on Entertainment

As his title suggests, John Benjamin Martin’s play “Fortnight” unfolds over 14 days. Even more exactly, Act I transpires over the first seven days, and Act II the last seven. Its hero is a science whiz, precisely tracking the course of a comet he reckons is headed to Earth and due to crash in, yes, 14 days.

Martin’s latest show under his Zeitgeist Theatre Company aegis at the Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, “Fortnight” would seem to be precision-made. Actually, it’s the equivalent of the fellow with one foot on a roller-skate and the other on a banana peel.

In his prolific output, Martin has always demonstrated a fondness for shaggy-dog playwriting, in which unlikely characters form even less likely bonds, story lines meander and the urge to talk is like a religious mission. Depending on his choice of situations and settings, the shagginess can be amiable or hyper-indulgent.

“Fortnight” painfully tilts to the latter, neither stylized enough in its comedy to juggle its impossibly disparate elements nor focused enough to really dramatize its jumble of ideas. And under Brooke Heys’ liberal direction, in which not one of Martin’s whims seems to have been pruned, the play’s sheer messiness becomes a long, aimless sit.

The self-conscious goofiness here begins with the whiz’s name, Paris Holiday, played by Robert Koch, as if he were running against the clock. To stretch out the pointless joke, Paris’ brother is named Roman (Troy Harris), who’s everything Paris is not: responsible, employed (as an attorney), neat and businesslike.

It would have been nice to have learned before the play’s last moments that Paris is a bona fide genius and so skilled in astronomy that he really can track previously undiscovered comets. The Paris we’re served up for more than two hours is a babbling, finally uninteresting peeping-Tom paranoid who latches on to anyone who walks in his door.

To the play’s severe harm, Paris’ meanderings dictate the dramatics, so what at first seems to be a portrait of a borderline idiot savant, or at least a guy who cannot handle all the activity in his brain (“I make Einstein look like an idiot,” he says feverishly at one point), becomes a sex comedy involving a pizza delivery guy (Joe Parisi), a strip dancer (Lori Fusaro) and her homicidal boyfriend (Rod Sweitzer).

It then becomes a tale about how Paris gets involved with a Senate reelection campaign and then about how he gets involved with a self-appointed spiritual guru (Richard Abraham) who blends cannabis with “Hamlet.”

It is all as chaotic as it sounds, and more. By the time we learn that Paris’ comet tracking--a phenomenon this comedy cleverly distracts us from--is correct, even the end of the world doesn’t really matter, and Roman and Paris’ friends appear to care less. Designer Sidney Wickersham certainly cares, though, with a gleefully well-observed set that tells us more about Paris’ cluttered state of mind than does Martin’s exhaustingly verbose play.

BE THERE

“Fortnight,” Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, 11006 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Oct. 1 and 15, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 21. (818) 506-8518. $12-$14. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.