‘Party’ talks a great game

Money may be a principal motive for the characters in Richard Greenberg’s “The Injured Party,” but whether they’re already wealthy or hoping to be soon, all are richly endowed with the author’s enviable bankroll of language.

In this curiously digressive play, which had its world premiere Friday at South Coast Repertory, cascades of golden words pour from the mouths of archly sophisticated New Yorkers, who even kvetch with a poet’s precision. It’s a reminder that Greenberg is one of the few living American playwrights (along with Edward Albee and David Mamet) who is a true stylist of English prose. Even when the drama occasionally seems wispy -- or sappily gropes for meaning at the end -- the symphony of voices never fails to entrance.

If these high-flown talkers were WASPs instead of Jews, this could indeed be Albee territory. But though the action of “The Injured Party” is similarly rooted in bright banter that’s not afraid to bludgeon, Greenberg is perhaps more preoccupied with tracing whimsical narrative arabesques.

The storytelling, which dips and dissolves in plot points too numerous and odd to synopsize, has an inventiveness that recalls the uncategorizable literary exploits of Jane Bowles. Greenberg’s play isn’t simply forging a nontraditional dramatic path but eddying in its own delightful contrivances.

The production, directed by Trip Cullman, has a kind of chic evanescence, which is appropriate since a recurring subject of conversation -- and a background metaphor for the drama as a whole -- is “The Gates,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 art-world frolic, which decked Central Park in billowing swaths of orange nylon.

Seth (Reg Rogers), a classically stalled Greenberg protagonist who must exercise operatic breath control for his epic arias of recrimination, is a floundering avant-gardist. As for “The Gates,” he has only disdain for what he considers a hoax on New York’s army of dilettantes, headed by his stinking-rich 94-year-old grandmother Maxene (Cynthia Harris). A matriarchal manipulator with a sympathetic streak, she wants him to accompany her to the Central Park installation and change his last name to hers. Angry and stuck, he wants to tap her bank account for his current project, a vaguely conceived multimedia curiosity he’s calling “The Re-Enactments,” while never letting her forget that her passive-aggressive ways killed his mother and ruined his life.

“The Injured Party” begins with a spoken letter from Seth to his dear friend and confidant Becca (Marin Ireland), whom he fears he may have frightened with his most recent diatribe while they were riding home in a taxi from his annual “Jew Christmas” at Maxene’s fabulous apartment. But in apologizing for his “exorbitant ire,” he winds up breathlessly duplicating his crime.

In a rush of reignited fury, Seth startlingly announces to Becca, “It becomes daily clearer to me that someone needs to say to her, ‘Maxene: You are wealthy, we are the living. Redistribution must commence.’ ”

But don’t imagine that old-fashioned larceny is the game here. Seth isn’t good at making things happen, but fortunately he’s not shy about narrating, and the play is framed as a series of anecdotal reenactments, which may in fact constitute the kind of work he’s impotently hankering to achieve.

What a crew Maxene has circling her vast fortune. In addition to her grandson, who’s apparently gay though jealously attached to Becca, an actress with a penchant for crazy straight men, there’s Bettina (Caroline Lagerfelt), a kleptomaniac with a defiantly retro flip hairdo and a notorious past involving a forensic pathologist turned necrophiliac. And Lawrence (T. Scott Cunningham), an expensively dressed Pillsbury Doughboy incessantly recycling opinions on the latest shows and books, whom Seth aptly calls a “machine of old lady pleasingness.”

Maxene refers to Bettina and Lawrence as her children, which scares the heck out of her grandson, who can think only of the impact on his inheritance. Maxene’s butler, Hans (Lorenzo Pisoni, energetically taking on a host of smaller roles), tries to ease Seth’s anxieties, though the issue is identity. Dependent on family money, Seth feels compromised at the level of his DNA, but instead of starting from financial scratch, he’d rather just rage about his lack of autonomy.

Rogers offers a humorously manic portrait of a guy who hasn’t figured out how to settle into himself. With his flouncy brown hair in perpetual motion and his habit of italicizing his vocabulary of scorn, he’s like a hyper-articulate basket case with a jet pack strapped to his back. If the performance hasn’t yet completely gelled, it may be because Greenberg doesn’t make it easy to get a handle on Seth. From his romantic desires to his professional aspirations, there’s something fundamentally indeterminate about his nature.

Harris’ Maxene has a more graspable character, and though this glamorous woman hardly seems to be in her mid-90s, she is recognizable as a quintessential Greenberg dragon with her manicured claws on the purse strings. She loves her grandson but on her own unbudging terms.

As “the superannuated freaks,” to quote Seth once again, Cunningham and Lagerfelt somehow manage to portray Bettina and Lawrence as peculiarly natural New York misfits. And it’s obvious why Seth can’t resist being apart from Ireland’s lovely Becca, even though their deepening domestic relationship seems more wishful than believable.

The most graceful aspect of Cullman’s work is the physical staging. Set designer’s David Korins’ tastefully modern Manhattan interior is transformed by Ben Stanton’s multihued lighting to reflect changing addresses and unstable moods.

The cast, fluidly alternating between direct address and dramatization, is arrayed at times as though a chess match were unfolding. But the battle of wits takes place in dazzlingly literary locutions rather than silent calculation.

Greenberg’s curvy story line may be an attempt to theatrically capture the ambling freedom of “The Gates,” but it’s the playwright’s verbal virtuosity that entices us to follow.

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charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

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‘The Injured Party’

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

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

Ends: May 11

Price: $28 to $62

Contact: (714) 708-5555

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes