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Luka’s Room
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
Rogue Machine Theatre
Through September 20
RECOMMENDED:
His father’s finances suddenly gone south (or perhaps merely hidden during the pendancy of his most recent divorce), 19 year old Luka Lupatelli (Nick Marini) must transfer from Arizona State to a San Fernando Valley community college and occupy the old paternal bedroom at addled Grandma Franca’s (Joanna Lipari) meager digs, across the hall from his ne’er-do-well Uncle Nick (Alex Fernandez), recently sprung from another short stint in County Jail. Luka (the spelling obviously obscuring its Italian origins), pretty much the naif, gets quite a sentimental education under both the avuncular influence and from an older (25-year-old) woman, Nick’s pot customer Angie (Sarah Scott). The greatest lesson, of course, is how sentiment has nothing to do with it.
Playwright Rob Mersola made a splash at Rogue Machine with his sloppily transgressive Dirty Filthy Love Story, and his new play may be more conventionally comical even as it traffics in some pressing contemporary issues of privacy and monetized celebrity. While neither particularly original nor surprising – its origins firmly rooted in the likes of Neil Simon’s debut Come Blow Your Horn, though blessedly barren of one-liners – its farcical requirements are rather demanding and consistently well met by this well-oiled but just short of slick production, directed by Joshua Britton and vividly performed by all hands.
Marini has the rare talent to make credible a callow Candide who may be the incarnation of the male ingenue, the persistent innocent in a world in which innocence has a half-life quicker than some radioactive elements.
Uncle Nick may be a familiarly craven type, but in Fernandez’s capable hands this forlorn hustler becomes a Jamie Tyrone divested of all tragic dimension. Nick’s alarmingly amusing advice to the impressionable Luka, delivered with earnest braggadocio, carries the ring of truth borne of experience while managing to be appalling wrong, and not too unpredictably manipulative.
It would be all too possible to mount a failed production of this rather imponderous material that requires a committed consistency of style and fleetness. In short, making it look easy is of the essence. It’s not Sheridan, Wilde or Coward, but what’s needed is not so very different, and despite the obvious standard limitations of budget and space, this quite persuasive and engrossing comedy comes off despite some of its limitations of substance because of its sustained illusion of effortlessness.
Broad laughs, however sporadic, still count for something, and Mersola attacks the sitcommy elements with an uncharacteristic intelligence and grit without getting too far beyond their inherent limitations. A good evening’s entertainment that one need not feel guilty about having enjoyed the morning after, Luka’s Room, with possibly some additional polish, could evolve into a laugher competitive with some of the better material presently on cable, here already blessed with the added pleasures of the immediacy of live zaniness struck on the anvil of real time for which theater has no peer.
Rogue Machine Theatre, 5041 W. Pico Blvd., Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (no perf. Sat. August 22); through Sept. 20. (855) 585-5185, https://RogueMachineTheatre.com
