This ‘Suite’ Best Left Unoccupied

Neil Simon long ago grew past the basic formulas he toyed with in his two “Suite” works--”Plaza Suite,” his Right Coast edition, and “California Suite,” his Left Coast follow-up. His “Brighton Beach” trilogy seemed to have put these earlier light comedies into a slumber, if not permanent hibernation.

Why return to “California Suite” now as Lonny Chapman’s Group Repertory Theatre in North Hollywood has done with director Robert Benedict’s production?

The revival doesn’t really offer an answer other than the implicit fact that this company hasn’t done Simon very often and has done lesser comic playwrights too many times. The four-section comedy, in which several couples fret and fight and love in the same suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, does give a number of Group Rep acting members an opportunity to do their thing.

Still, it feels too much like a string of episodes from “Love, American Style,” and the flimsiness begins with Simon. No, Michele Bernath and Brian Van Dusen don’t exactly convince as a long-divorced couple in the opener, but they are also hamstrung by the scene’s endless cliches about New York versus Los Angeles. Bernath’s ultra-chauvinist New Yorker starts off condemning L.A. as smelling “like an overripe cantaloupe,” and it goes downhill from there. The wisecracks get in the way of character involvement, and the actors sound as if they’re reciting. There was hardly a laugh in the house Sunday.

Simon loves plunging his people into total panic to see how they’ll get out, which is why the second scene, with Philadelphia visitors Marvin and Millie Michaels (Stan Mazin and Renee Gorsey), is the play’s funniest. It’s simple: Marvin wakes up in bed, not with Millie (who’s due to arrive for their nephew’s bar mitzvah), but with a sloshed hooker named Bunny (Pascale Gigon). Can Marvin conceal Bunny from Millie, who soon enters the suite? Mazin connects with the panic as if it were deadly real, which makes this familiar situation pulse with life.

The third scene--about British actress Diana (Christina Carson) taking her gay-but-betrothed Sidney (Christopher Winfield) to the Oscars, only to lose and get drunk in despair--is peppered with various referential updates (her director is Kenneth Branagh), but the end result is a pretty insulting view of actresses as pouty egomaniacs. It hardly helps that Carson’s dialect is situated somewhere halfway across the Pond, but Winfield is utterly true as the patient better half.

The finale is pretty sad business because director Benedict hasn’t cast with an eye for physical comedy. Chicago friends Mort and Beth (Michael Twiane and Joan-Lorraine Huddleston) and Gert and Stu (Meia Carr and Ramon Angeloni) have had it with vacationing together, and it’s come to the breaking point on the tennis court, where Beth has sprained her foot. By the time this sloppy farce is over, all four are yelping in pain for some reason and the whole point is lost.

In the meantime, there are opportunities to admire set designer Oshin Thomassian’s fine work, which includes such details as elegant wall lighting, a fully decorated upstage hallway and a sunny French-windowed balcony.

But with Alan Ayckbourn’s marks all over this and the earlier “Suite” play, from the schematic storytelling to the caustic views of relationships, it’s fair to wonder why Group Rep didn’t take a fresher approach and just do one of Ayckbourn’s many brilliant comedies. Hint: There’s always next time.

BE THERE

“California Suite,” Lonny Chapman’s Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends June 9. $16. (818) 769-7529. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.