‘Henry and Tom’: A Lot of Talk

Being stranded in the Maryland woods with the historical personages in “Camping With Henry and Tom” is rather like being seated at a dinner party next to people who speak volubly and well, yet don’t have much worth saying.

Playwright Mark St. Germain puts words into the mouths of Henry Ford, Thomas Alva Edison and President Warren G. Harding, apparently to show how flawed yet visionary people come forward, generation after generation, to point America toward the future. In a lively conversation that weighs business against politics, forceful leadership against compassion, St. Germain attempts to demonstrate how our nation thinks.

Yet in the end, he overwhelms the audience with words, not ideas. His play was a mixed success when introduced to the Southland in a 1996 production at the Pasadena Playhouse, and the same is true of a new McCoy Rigby Entertainment presentation at La Mirada Theatre.

St. Germain took the germ of his play from an actual event: Ford, Edison and Harding did go camping together in 1921. The rest St. Germain fabricated from the men’s personal philosophies and the political climate of their time.

As the story begins, the men have slipped away from the press corps covering their excursion (which, in real life, they did not do) and become stranded when Ford’s Model T crashes off the road after colliding with a deer. Tom Buderwitz’s set design allows a glimpse of the crash through a stand of full-size pine trees.

While waiting for Harding’s Secret Service man to find them, Ford (David Q. Combs) reveals why he has lured Harding (Peter Van Norden) and the reluctant Edison (Jack Kissell) away from camp. The president’s infidelity with a young woman soon enters the conversation, as does a controversial plan to supply electricity to a fast-growing part of the country.

The continuing relevance of such topics grabs our attention, as does the wry humor coaxed from the dialogue by Kissell, rasping from the sidelines as the irascible Edison, and Van Norden, vibrating with vulnerability and need as Harding. As of Saturday’s opening, however, Combs remained a performance or two away from mastering the excitable, bullying Ford.

In a program note, director Michael Michetti delivers a well-considered analysis of St. Germain’s play, as well as a provocative new way of understanding it in the aftermath of Sept. 11. But as with the play itself, the pretty words dissolve into nothingness between the page and the stage.

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“Camping With Henry and Tom,” La Mirada Theatre, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 28. $35. (562) 944-9801 or (714) 994-6310.