‘Amy’ Lets More Stars Shine

David Hare’s “Amy’s View” takes a panoramic look at a 16-year span in the lives of its characters and an indirect glimpse at cultural changes in England between 1979 and 1995. But it feels surprisingly detailed and solid, without the sketchy quality that often afflicts plays that attempt to cover so much in less than three hours.

In only four scenes, it offers some of the pleasures of a good novel or even a great miniseries--and you won’t know how heretical the latter comparison is until you’ve seen the play.

Hare doesn’t explain everything for us, most notably one traumatic event that happens offstage between scenes three and four. But this development seems like one of life’s unexpected twists, not like a writer’s contrivance. Earlier, the play has several other surprises in store, and these feel more carefully plotted. They’re woven in so skillfully that they become strokes of masterful storytelling.

Until recently, the play was seen primarily as a star vehicle for Judi Dench in London and New York. The play’s celebrity-free local premiere, at South Coast Repertory in 2000, didn’t get great reviews.

The Los Angeles County premiere by International City Theatre in Long Beach prominently promotes the casting of Carol Lawrence and Susan Egan.

But the play is the thing. True, the Dench-Lawrence character, Esme, is a British stage star with definite diva traits. But two of the other roles are almost as big and as complex. Even the three smaller roles are distinctive.

As the play opens, Esme’s daughter Amy (Egan) and new beau Dominic (John Berczeller) are at Esme’s suburban London home, awaiting her midnight return from an appearance on the West End. The widowed Esme and Dominic have never met. Amy is nervous because she has a confidential favor to ask of her mother.

By the second scene, six years later, the tension between Esme and Dominic is rising. He’s a TV journalist and would-be filmmaker with little regard for Esme’s life in the theater. She sees him as an interloper who isn’t good for Amy. Amy is caught in the middle.

In the third scene, in 1993, Esme has fallen off her pedestal. At the advice of her loving neighbor and would-be husband (Shelly Kurtz), she invested in financial schemes that tanked in the ‘90s. This turn of events registers more strongly in America since the bursting of the tech-boom bubble than it did a few years ago. The last act finds Esme seeking solace in fringe theater.

Although some have said that the balance of sympathy is tilted too far toward Esme, she and Dominic are both individuals whose pride goes before a fall. And Amy is a plucky but torn young woman whose efforts to take control of her life are doomed.

Esme’s mother-in-law (Patricia Place) ages in the background, at first querulously, then silently. But the appearance of a young actor (Thomas Patrick Kelly) in the final scene suggests the beginning of a new cycle of life.

Under Jessica Kubzansky’s direction, Lawrence lacks the impossibly crisp diction that you would expect from an English stage star, but she inhabits the role fully in every other way. Egan is an ideal mirror for Amy’s balancing act between the active and the passive. Berczeller masters Dominic’s cockiness and his later chastening. Kurtz’s avoidance of any hint of malice makes his character more and more fascinating.

Anyone who was turned off by Hare’s shallow “The Blue Room” should give him another chance with “Amy’s View.”

*”Amy’s View,” Long Beach Center Theater, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends. Sept. 29. $27-$35. (562) 436-4610. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

Carol Lawrence...Esme Allen

Susan Egan...Amy Thomas

John Berczeller...Dominic Tyghe

Patricia Place...Evelyn Thomas

Shelly Kurtz...Frank Oddie

Thomas Patrick Kelly...Toby Cole

By David Hare. Directed by Jessica Kubzansky. Set by Susan Gratch. Costumes by Diana Eden. Lighting by Rand Ryan. Music/sound by Steve Goodie. Stage manager Michael Laun.