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Tell Mr. Poulos

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
At the Dorie Theatre at The Complex
Through October 25


RECOMMENDED:


Donald Wollner’s comedy about a hapless little guy done in by the system and his own unmanageable urges isn’t exactly cutting edge satire.  But it is diverting enough to entertain.

Director Page Burkholder’s stripped-down staging  features Beresford Bennett as Jimmy, a middle manager type whose wife Lisa (Yetta Gottesman) works part time in a nursing home to help make ends meet.  Essentially a timid man, Jimmy lives life by the rules and seems not entirely at home in his own skin.  The couple have an infant son  and being a Daddy is another circumstance Jimmy’s struggling to adapt to.

The marriage’s reasonably contented routine upends after Jimmy loses his job and must undergo a series of humiliating job interviews (conducted by quick change performer, Kina Bermudez, who ably impersonates a string of strident or flaky interviewers).

On the job hunt, he runs into Isabelle (Lindsey Andersen), an attractive but unstable woman who fixates on Jimmy as the man she wants in her life.  Despite his efforts to keep their relationship manageable, platonic, and secret, his wife learns about  their friendship – the dippy Isabelle calls her up to inform her – – and hell breaks loose.

With their relationship on the downswing, both Jimmy and Lisa begin pouring forth their trials and tribulations to Mr. Poulus, an elderly immigrant they’ve rented their bedroom to in order to compensate for lost income.

Though Bennett’s performance isn’t entirely off-target, his befuddled everyman is a bit too generic to be thoroughly involving.  Instead, it’s Gottesman as his emotionally and sexually frustrated wife – basking in the attentions of a 90-year-old patient – who establishes  the more colorful and comical presence.  Andersen fills the bill as a damaged coquette trading on her fragility.  Holder, like Bennett, needs to flesh his cryptic character out a little more.

The staging also could use enhancement.  Although many fine productions have succeeded on a bare or spare proscenium, this narrative might have been benefited  from a set that better expressed the cold garish Kafka-esque realities the playwright is trying to comment on.  I also noticed that Jimmy looked rumpled from the start; how much better would it have been to see him decline in appearance as his options lessened and then disappeared.


The Dorie Theatre at The Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m.;, Sun., 5 p.m.; through Oct. 25. (866) 811-4111 or  https://wildtown.org/