‘Shooting Craps’ Delivers Meager Payoff

Making money as a commercial playwright is unlikely, but not impossible. Tom Dulack scored his biggest payday with the wise guys comedy “Breaking Legs” (1989), wherein a couple of Mafiosi invest in a college professor’s play. It was thin, the second act puttered, the comic stereotypes were ultra-familiar, blah blah blah.

Since when did any of that matter? In the wake of a strong launch at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre (now known as the Globe), the play has been off-Broadwayed, national toured and multifariously dinner theatered. Productions surely will pop up for another decade or three wherever anyone has made a few bucks on “The Foreigner” or “Lend Me a Tenor.”

On its chosen level of dopiness, something about “Breaking Legs” works with an audience. On roughly the same level, something about Dulack’s newest, “Shooting Craps,” doesn’t.

The world premiere opened over the weekend at the El Portal Center for the Performing Arts. Even with the estimable Harold Gould headlining, the strangely conflicted comedy putters when it should clickety-clack.

As with “Breaking Legs,” “Shooting Craps” operates from a handy, shoot-it-to-me-in-one-sentence premise. Uncle Carmine hires a phony Native American to front for a proposed gambling casino, the key to his niece’s mayoral reelection campaign. There it is. In a retro “Cancel My Reservation” sort of way, it’s a premise with promise: You could offend lots of different people with it.

Yet Dulack, perhaps smarting from some (extremely touchy) criticism leveled at the Italian Americans in “Breaking Legs,” spends the whole play hemming and hawing, wanting to offend a little, but, you know, not really; not much. He goes out of his way to elevate the extended Caruso family above cliche, yet much of the time in “Shooting Craps,” he’s trading in bribery-and-jailbird gags that wouldn’t have made the cut in “Breaking Legs.”

Carmine (Gould) lives with his 93-year-old terror of a mother, Lena (Laura James). Carmine’s niece, Joanna (Sonja Alarr), is the local mayor, her approval rating presently in the toilet. A gambling casino would clinch her reelection. Snag? No Native American tribe in the vicinity.

So Carmine and his crony, Charlie Fox (Greg Lewis), get in touch with one Fabio Calabrese, just out of the pokey in Chicago. Fabio sends to New Jersey “a full-blooded Agua Caliente” Indian, name of Chief Buffalo Calf, a hash-smoking con man whose real name is Herschel Grossback.

It has been awhile since we’ve had Yiddish-dialect humor in “redskin” garb--Eddie Cantor in “Whoopee,” maybe. (Just so we understand the show-biz tradition afoot, sound designer Steve Shaw at one point offers up Ethel Merman’s rendition of “I’m an Indian Too.”)

There’s something hilariously cheap in hauling out this kind of ethnic shtick in 2001. But Dulack makes precious little of his faux Native American, played in strenuous Bob Denver fashion by Alan Altshuld. No jokes, no invention, no nothing with this key role. Which means there’s a large hole in “Shooting Craps” where the comic engine should go.

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Dulack throws in an FBI agent (Larry Anderson) to investigate possible Mafia/gambling ties. This character shares a protracted scene with Madame Mayor that’s a textbook illustration in how not to handle expository information. Aside from one genuinely funny cell-phone joke, the running gags don’t fare much better. (Someone says to Lena that so-and-so’s dead; like clockwork Lena replies, “Nobody tells-a me nothing!”) Some of the malapropisms earn not even a solid Norm Crosby groan (“ethnic perversity” for “diversity”). And in Act 2 Dulack turns sincere on us; the mayor complains of the “endemic racism” her people have experienced as Italian Americans.

Dulack directs the El Portal premiere. The cast is game, if a bit colorless--aside from Gould, that is. He is a most un-egotistical fine actor. To strong material (“The Substance of Fire” at San Diego’s Globe Theatre) and weaker fare, Gould lends a sense of gravity and relaxed authority. “Shooting Craps” isn’t much. But Gould doesn’t dog it in the least.

* “Shooting Craps,” El Portal Center for the Arts, 5269 Lankershim Blvd. (near Magnolia), North Hollywood. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 7 p.m.; Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 25. $30-$45. (818) 508-4200. Running time: 2 hours.

Shooting Craps

Harold Gould:Carmine Caruso

Laura James: Lena Caruso

Sonja Alarr: Joanna Caruso

Greg Lewis: Charlie Fox

Alan Altshuld: Chief Buffalo Calf

Larry Anderson: Clayton Robinson

Written and directed by Tom Dulack. Scenic design by Don Gruber. Costumes by Cathy Crane-McCoy. Lighting by Jim Moody. Sound by Steve Shaw. Production stage manager David Mingrino.