Try hard to stick with ‘Marjorie’

The narrator has barely begun to set the scene for “Princess Marjorie” when he amiably issues an invitation for the audience to flee while it still can.

It’s a knowing wink at events last spring, when Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory introduced Southland audiences to fledgling playwright Noah Haidle and his dramatic comedy “Mr. Marmalade.” Reaction to that story of a little girl with a shockingly adult view of the world -- revealed, for instance, in a game of doctor that goes too far -- ranged from wide-eyed, I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing amusement to disgusted, mid-scene walkouts.

More seat squirming is in store in Haidle’s “Princess Marjorie,” presented on South Coast Repertory’s Julianne Argyros Stage. Only this time, the author is really trying to tease the audience into sticking around.

The new play is another dramatic comedy. Its topics, rather surprising from someone who’s just 26, are the ephemerality of beauty and the nature of memory.

That narrator at the top of the show is Harper, who is preparing for a visit by his long-absent cousin, Marjorie.

As he sets up the story, Harper explains that when he and his brother, Charlie, were on the cusp of adolescence, the slightly older Marjorie came to live with them. “I should tell you, Marjorie was something of a legend around here,” Harper says. “She was the collective fantasy of every teenager in this town, some people say the entire county.”

Boys being boys, the smitten brothers drilled a peephole from their room to hers. What they witnessed became seared into their imaginations.

Where “Mr. Marmalade” gave us a view of the world through the eyes of a child grown up too fast, “Princess Marjorie” offers the view through adults who’ve never left adolescence.

Although the actors playing Harper and Charlie -- Michael Gladis and Nathan Baesel, respectively -- look to be about the same age as Haidle, they come to seem more like symbolic embodiments of the young age at which the characters’ development was arrested. This sense of living in the past is heightened by the fact that the childhood home that Harper prepares for Marjorie’s return is, in Darcy Scanlin’s design, the mere ghostly outline of the two bedrooms, trimmed in neon. The tubes’ blurry light suggests the haze of memory.

Gladis’ Harper quickly engages the audience with his easygoing manner and cockeyed grin. Baesel’s Charlie -- a scruffy slacker who still whines in the petulant cadences of childhood -- is pricklier. Yet in his idiosyncratic way, he too is endearing.

It’s good that the brothers are likable from the start, because their actions aren’t. Their peephole memories linger in joint sexual practices, including ritual reenactments -- all shown to the audience in the play’s early minutes. Though conducted, under David Chambers’ direction, in a heightened, comic style, such activities can’t help but give theatergoers the creeps.

As in “Mr. Marmalade,” there’s a sense here of a young writer seeing what he can get away with. And Haidle gets away with quite a lot since his stories gradually reveal themselves to be rather sweet and even, dare I say, moral.

When Marjorie arrives (nearly half an hour into the play), the brothers experience two immediate turnoffs: Their cousin is married, and she’s older, which, in their adolescent minds, means she’s not pretty anymore.

Charlie, the more voluble of the pair, blurts out: “You’re [obscenity] ugly.” He also uses the word “hideous.”

Of course, Marjorie is by no means hideous. Indeed, Khrystyne Haje, the actress playing her, is Gwyneth Paltrow pretty. It’s just that old American double standard: Men can let themselves go fat and sloppy, yet they’re capable of the most incredible cruelty toward any woman who develops so much as a wrinkle.

Theatergoers need to stick around for the second act, though, to see this theme developed. Because the story is so front-loaded with icky stuff, it’s possible to head into intermission with your skin crawling, wondering whether Haidle’s “Mr. Marmalade” -- now drawing attention across the country -- was a fluke.

It’s mostly the promise of more screwball comedy from the enjoyable performers -- including snooty-voiced John Vickery as Marjorie’s stuffy husband -- that lures theatergoers back to their seats. (And even at that, half a dozen audience members headed straight for their cars at an opening-weekend matinee.)

“Princess Marjorie,” with its aggressively -- if irreverently -- in-your-face style, can really get to a person. In the end, that turns out to be a good thing, because the themes penetrate that much deeper into the theatergoer’s ripped-open soul.

But God help you -- you’d better be ready for it.

*

‘Princess Marjorie’

Where: South Coast Repertory, Julianne Argyros Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 7:45 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 7:45 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: March 27

Price: $27 to $56

Contact: (714) 708-5555 or www.scr.org

Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes

Nathan Baesel...Charlie

Michael Gladis...Harper

Khrystyne Haje...Marjorie

John Vickery...Steven/Sam/P.J.

Written by Noah Haidle. Director David Chambers. Set Darcy Scanlin. Costumes Angela Balogh Calin. Lights Peter Maradudin. Dramaturge Jerry Patch. Stage manager Randall K. Lum.