Vengeance, with a laugh

“You take direction rather well,” says a vengeance-minded former stage manager with a knack for melodrama, menacing his terrified quarry with a loaded pistol. “Most actors have to ask about their motivation.”

Such is the witty, mutually reinforcing interplay between reality and theatrical artifice that fuels “Stage Struck,” Simon Gray’s sardonic 1979 twist on the British mystery-thriller genre. Rick Sparks’ staging for the Colony Theatre offers some well-executed, entertaining flourishes, though there’s less to the play than meets the eye.

The recent New York revival of “Butley” has sparked renewed interest in Gray, a longtime collaborator with Harold Pinter and the late Alan Bates. Gray’s forte is the cerebral game of cat and mouse in which his beleaguered protagonists attempt to turn the tables on their opponents. Heroic cleverness notwithstanding, their victories are usually Pyrrhic.

However, the plot-driven “Stage Struck” offers nowhere near “Butley’s” character depth and razor-sharp writing. Here, the self-destructive psychological puppeteer is ex-stage manager Robert Simon (an amusingly narcissistic Louis Lotorto), happily married to successful actress and breadwinner Anne (Mary Gordon Murray) until she informs him that, based on a psychiatrist’s advice, she is throwing him out and cutting him off.

Armed with a gun and dagger efficiently provided in the opening scene by a milquetoast guest-cottage lodger (Kevin Symons), Robert mounts an intricate, dangerous counteroffensive against the shrink (Larry Cedar, oozing pedantic complacency). Drawing on his stagecraft expertise, he employs blanks and live ammo, dead bodies and dummies, and liberal quantities of stage blood (the Colony’s high production values come in handy here).

Of course, nothing is what it seems as the puzzle progresses toward its predictably unpredictable unraveling, following in the tradition of “Sleuth” (from which it borrows quite shamelessly at times).

As Robert, Lotorto strikes the right balance of haughty self-importance and comic timing with such lines as: “This moment means too much to me to be improvised.”

Murray deftly navigates Anne’s twists and turns without telegraphing them in advance, while Cedar and Symons convincingly shift gears to unmask their respective characters’ hidden agendas.

To punch up the show’s theatricality, Sparks’ staging extends the setting to include momentary “backstage” perspectives while leaving the text intact -- a somewhat arbitrary conceit with little practical payoff.

*

‘Stage Struck’

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

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Also 3 p.m. Saturday and Feb. 24, and 8 p.m. March 1 and 8

Ends: March 11

Price: $37 to $42

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

Running time: 2 hours