Family reconciliation has a ghost of a chance

“You always looked so old to me, Grandma,” says adult malcontent George Barberie to the matriarch who dominated his traumatic Brooklyn childhood. “Now, we’re the same age.” The comment, delivered by actor Greg Mullavey with irony and anguish, signals the gist of “4318 Clarendon Road” at the West Valley Playhouse. George Tricker’s memory play about a spiky Italian American clan and the adult survivor who recalls them hides accessible points within workaday observations.

The semiautobiographical premise -- George, returned to East Flatbush for his father’s funeral, observes family ghosts and his younger self (David Sandler) to exorcise their legacy -- leans a bit heavily on self-help sentiment. Some aspects feel over-familiar. Yet authentic family dynamics and hilarity are also at play, and Tricker uses his crowd-friendly instincts to achieve strong audience reactions.

Jennifer Taub’s solid direction keeps things honest. Designer Charles W. Hall could further distress his otherwise respectable set, but Don Nelson’s costumes and Danny Truxaw’s lights are helpful.

The ensemble devours every opportunity, centered by Mullavey’s involved, touching George. As Grandmother Edith, Janet Notey covers deep feeling with acrid aplomb. Tom Moses and Bob Caso are excellent as George’s empathetic grandfather and abusive father, respectively, and Noel Britton’s vulnerability suits George’s mother.

Although the great-grandfather of Bernie McGinnis sounds more Swedish than Italian, he lands each zinger, and Nancy Wolfe’s old-country great-grandmother and Zoe Pietrycha’s urbane aunt are finds. Dana Sandler’s mentally challenged kid brother completes the roster. As George himself learns, they’re a nice family, once you get to know them.

-- David C. Nichols

“4318 Clarendon Road,” West Valley Playhouse, 7242 Owensmouth Ave., Canoga Park. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends June 12. $22. (818) 884-1907. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

*

‘Melancholy’ is a state of mind

It is whimsy, not sadness, that fuels Sarah Ruhl’s trifling, occasionally touching chamber piece “Melancholy Play.” Characters with fairy-tale outlines -- a tailor (Rob Helms), a hairdresser (Kristina Lear), a nurse (Marilyn Dodds Frank), a shrink of “unspecified European” extraction (Karl Wiedergott) -- circle the salon-like stage of the new Hayworth Theatre, freely declaiming or singing their feelings with the stubbornly self-involved candor of drama queens.

Their preferred emotional state is what one calls the “necessary bodily humor” of melancholy. And their main devotion is to Tilly (Polly Noonan), a swoony, free-spirited bank teller, newly arrived in town, who embodies that “sexy, sad feeling” like no one else.

Until, suddenly one day, she doesn’t.

Perhaps the play’s singular smiling perversity explains why this central transformation -- from Tilly’s ostensible mania for depression to her subsequent bursting bubbliness -- barely registers. In director Chris Fields’ sparkling, knowing production, it’s all a put-on, and the difference between sad Tilly and happy Tilly is measured in volume, not emotional range.

The cast essays this candy-colored world -- the sort of place in which adults at a birthday party play duck-duck-goose -- with brittle earnestness and a delicate, nearly musical sense of timing. An onstage cellist (Joseph Mendoes) sits in a tux under a blue light and saws away passionately, providing both underscoring and accompaniment for composer Michael Roth’s mock-chorales.

A later song memorably lists items that can trigger the dark moods of the title: windows, smells, slanting afternoon light. If Ruhl’s play actually evoked rather than recited even a moment of genuine heartsickness, we might feel something more than bemused.

-- Rob Kendt

“Melancholy Play,” Echo Theatre Company at the Hayworth Theatre, 643 Carondelet St., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends June 19. $15 and $20. (800) 413-8669 or www.echotheatrecompany.com. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

*

Words unwoven on the ‘Loom’

There’s a first for everything: I’ve never seen an Irish play in which the main character is scolded, and justly so, for being unable to tell a good story.

The play is Gary Mitchell’s overwrought “Tearing the Loom,” set in 1798 in Northern Ireland, during one of many insurrections and counter-insurrections. And the character is Robert (Robert Pescovitz), who is too earnest, too didactic a man to spin a good yarn, even though he is, ironically enough, a master weaver.

During the course of this 90-minute one-act, Robert, who loves nothing more than the status quo, will watch his world crumble, as his son David (Nick Cernoch) and daughter Ruth (Vonessa Martin) find themselves on opposite sides of the civil strife and end up unwittingly bringing a battle home.

Mitchell’s drama could sure use a good storyteller at its core, because without one, director Brad Price’s production seems little more than a series of cardboard mouthpieces, expressing points of view more urgently as they go on.

There’s the rigidly pro-England Samuel (Michael Jerome West), his impressionable son William (Shawn Lee) and the democratic idealist Harry (Eric Pargac), who vies with William for Ruth’s affections, and whose willingness to adapt his perspective makes him more sympathetic but not more believable.

The only convincing character is Robert’s mum Anne, and in that role Jenifer Parker struggles nobly against the pervasive contrivances of Mitchell’s drama and the constrained awkwardness of the staging.

The design work for this Furious Theatre Company production certainly transports us to a different era, and the show could be given the “Best Use of Nooses” award for its credible depictions of violence. But from its opening scene of coldblooded murder to its too-predictable climax of more coldblooded murder, “Tearing the Loom” is a relentlessly depressing piece of work without the dramatic illumination into human motivation, confusion or grief required to make it worthwhile.

-- Steven Oxman

“Tearing the Loom,” Pasadena Playhouse Balcony Theatre, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends June 26. $15 and $24. (626) 356-PLAY. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

*

Left to wonder ‘If Only ... ‘

Missed opportunities abound in “If Only ... ,” Matthew Goldsby’s ambitious but unfortunate musicalization of Balzac’s “Le Pere Goriot.”

Balzac’s 1835 novel dramatized -- some say melodramatized -- the moral quicksand of a materialist, post-revolutionary France. In Goldsby’s streamlined but still overpopulated adaptation, though, we get more plot points than narrative sense.

Wide-eyed young law student Eugene (Dustin Strong) crashes Paris society to chase wealthy married women, with the encouragement of a well-placed cousin (Elisa J. Nixon). He eagerly learns the right social moves, but in the process drains his family’s savings and manages to overlook the lovely, virtuous heiress next door, Victorine (Makinna Ridgway).

It takes another of Eugene’s fellow boarders, the diabolical dandy Vautrin (Fred Sanders), to point out Victorine’s market value. Yet another boarder, the distracted oldster Goriot (Norman Snow), gloms onto Eugene when he finds out the young man is wooing his daughter (Leslie McDonel), who only calls on dad when she’s short on cash.

Craig Carlisle’s nimble direction gives the material what shape it has, though only the large-cast scenes in the boarding house really come to life. Goldsby’s score has moments witty (“Wits With Us,” the protestation of a pair of crusty pensioners, well played by Melinda Peterson and Robert W. Goldsby) and pretty (“I Can Tell,” a ballad given ringing tones by Ridgway’s ripe soprano).

But mostly his neoclassical music and banal lyrics plod along blandly. “Let go and simply flow,” Victorine advises Eugene at one point. If it were that simple, there would be no show.

-- R.K.

“If Only ... ,” Tugboat Productions at the Globe Playhouse, 1107 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends June 19. $20. (323) 960-7863 or www.plays411.com. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.