For feline fanciers, it’s the cat’s meow

If you take your theater light and sweet -- and without a whole lot of flavor -- then “Indoor/Outdoor” might be the type of serviceable, generic theater right up your alley. Especially if you like cats -- not the musical, mind you, but the domestic pet.

Kenny Finkle’s play, receiving its West Coast premiere at the Colony Theatre in Burbank, has a highly marketable gimmick: Its main character is a cat. But once that device settles in, “Indoor/Outdoor” is purely paint-by-numbers.

Samantha (Tessa Thompson) believes she has found true love with Shuman (Jeff Marlow), a computer nerd who adopts her and initially showers her with affection. She soon discovers that Shuman’s world doesn’t revolve around her -- he goes out for long periods of time and, what’s worse, he doesn’t even bother to tell her where he’s been.

Samantha finds a friend to consult in the vet’s receptionist, the quirky Matilda (Shana Wride), who, fortunately, speaks “cat.” Under Matilda’s tutelage, Samantha becomes more independent and realizes a true sense of self when she hunts and kills a mouse in a sequence very cleverly staged by director Stefan Novinski on Susan Gratch’s playpen of a set. And, just in case we forget the woman-cat metaphor (which is unlikely), Finkle hammers it home with the line: “I am tigress; hear me roar.”

Enter Oscar (Louis Lotorto), an adventurous outdoor alley cat who falls hard for the female feline, and vice versa. Suddenly, Shuman’s cozy home feels like a trap to Samantha, and she begins to plot her escape, even while she feels guilty for betraying him.

This is hardly the first theatrical work to personify an animal onstage in pursuit of profundity, or, at least, a good time. We’ve had singing cats, of course, in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical “Cats.” A.R. Gurney Jr. found off-Broadway and regional success with “Sylvia,” in which a dog (Sarah Jessica Parker created the title role) comes between husband and wife. And move beyond theater to, say, film animation, and we’d have to recognize that stories using animals as if they were human is one of our most popular forms of narrative entertainment.

Let’s face it, as a breed, we like animals, maybe more than we like people. The good-natured “Indoor/Outdoor” capitalizes on this general predisposition. We like Samantha, in part just because she’s a cat and in part because the smiling Thompson is awfully easy to like. And there’s nothing not to like in the quirky supporting characters either, particularly since they’re played with plenty of comic panache. In fact, this play is so busy being likable it forgets to be interesting.

Finkle describes the issue best in his own program notes: “There is very little subtext -- there is very little gray -- characters say what they feel or can’t say what they feel but are still transparent in it. They are completely earnest, they don’t comment, they are pure.”

They are also, therefore, more than a little bit dull. They might be human or they might be feline, but in the end they’re all just Smurfs.

*

‘Indoor/Outdoor’

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

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

Ends: Sept. 18

Price: $30 to $40

Contact: (818) 558-7000, www.colonytheatre.org

Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes