This ‘Clutter’ may be worth spreading around

A packrat’s motto: “This could be worth something someday.” And so the clutter grows.

Mark Saltzman’s new play “Clutter” is already worth a lot. As staged by Rick Sparks for the Colony Theatre, this examination of the Collyer brothers -- the world’s most famous packrats -- is shamelessly entertaining.

A few of the play’s techniques are straight out of the old-movie, brass-tacks school of storytelling suggested by the subtitle: “The True Story of the Collyer Brothers Who Never Threw Anything Out.” Doses of this breathless, believe-it-or-not style -- complete with a heavy-breathing musical soundtrack -- help move the show along.

But Saltzman doesn’t depict the Collyers as completely weird. By the end, he makes a broader point about the common human insecurities that surely contributed to the Collyers’ problems.

For nearly 40 years, the blue-blooded bachelors, Homer and Langley Collyer, filled their Harlem brownstone with 150 tons of clutter, eventually stacked to the ceiling.

In 1947, an anonymous source informed the police that a body was on the premises. Officers soon found Homer’s corpse, but two weeks -- and a media frenzy -- passed before Langley’s cadaver was discovered under his own junk.

“Clutter” sticks fairly close to the historical record about the Collyers, with one odd exception: As the play begins, their father has outlived their mother. In fact, the father died first, and the Collyers’ attachment to their mother resulted in speculation from armchair psychoanalysts that Oedipal feelings led to the Collyers’ hoarding.

Saltzman, however, isn’t especially interested in the parents. He wants to explore the brothers’ roles as each other’s keepers.

Near the beginning of the play, Homer promises his father to take care of the younger, more scatterbrained Langley. But after Homer becomes blind, the roles are reversed.

Although both are dedicated hoarders, they’re far apart in many other ways. Langley (Patrick Richwood) is a swishy, unsuccessful pianist who dresses like Oscar Wilde.

Homer (Ed F. Martin) seldom changes his suit, but at least it’s not five decades out of date. Intensely suspicious in money matters, Homer occasionally works as an attorney and talks about moving across the street to get away from Langley’s pianistic struggles.

Saltzman made up another pair of brothers -- two Irish American cops who discover Homer’s body and investigate Langley’s disappearance. Their perspective from 1947 serves as the play’s skeleton, but they’re more than narrators.

Reilly Dolan (Jason Field) is a burly guy who was deferred from World War II for a medical reason. He moved up in the police force, occasionally encountering the Collyers, while his leaner brother, Kevin (Seamus Dever), was a POW in Japan. Now Reilly wants to turn Kevin into a cop.

The parallel between the sets of brothers isn’t very precise. We don’t even know the cops are brothers until the second act.

Still, the four central performances are so richly comic that quibbles about the script fade. Christopher Fairbanks and Mark Christopher Tracy are expert chameleons in a variety of other roles.

Bradley Kaye’s set is part literal, part figurative. But any regret that there isn’t enough actual clutter vanishes in a brilliant scene involving an overflowing doorway.

The writing in “Clutter” isn’t as elegant as Richard Greenberg’s in “The Dazzle,” another recent play about the Collyers, which focuses on their younger years in a more speculative fashion. But the vigor and humor of “Clutter” prove that fidelity to the facts sometimes yields a much livelier yarn.

*

‘Clutter’

Where: Colony Theatre, 555 N. 3rd St., Burbank

When: Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 3 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: March 7

Price: $26-$32

Contact: (818) 558-7000

Running Time: 2 hours, 20 minutes