The Mother Ship

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Sacred Fools Theatre
Through August 2

Photo by Jessica Sherman Photography

Playwright/director Jonas Oppenheim’s  attempt to cast light on the problems of infertile couples while making comic hay in the fashion of a British sex farce is a sore disappointment.  Missing the crisp humor abundant in the work of Ayckbourne, Frayn and Orton, the show’s on-stage antics along with much of the writing recall a high school endeavor.

The play opens with wife Penelope’s (Aviva Pressman) frantic realization that she is now ovulating and her strident demand that her husband Trevor (Bryan Bellomo) drop what he’s doing and screw her immediately. Though Trevor obliges, the couple’s frenetic efforts at copulation are soon sabotaged by the telephone, the maid (Julia Griswold), the water heater repairman (Scott Golden) and the arrival of Trevor’s baneful family, led by his mom Rose (Lynn Odell), a viperous matriarch who loves vodka, sex with Israeli commandoes, and vicious take-downs of her loved ones. An extended scene follows in which the impossibly self-satisfied Rose insults everyone, while a series of verbal slips and innuendoes among the group impact on the already insecure Penelope’s raggedy ego.

In Scene 2, the piece shifts away from the fertility issue with the introduction of a company of lost-in-space aliens commandeered by a Captain Pex (Stephen Simon). Soon, via a fantastical malfunction in the water heater, the captain is transported to Trevor and Penelope’s living room, where he becomes the object of female lust, while Trevor finds himself trapped on the spaceship — at first threatened, then corralled into becoming its leader. Silly but not satiric, the dialogue in these spaceship scenes resembles that of a sci-fi B movie from the 1950s, the sort of thing re-imagined by pre-adolescent boys. The social commentary and political lampooning which would transform this kind of inanity into something waggish or clever is nowhere evident.

All this is something of an unhappy surprise to me given my prior experience with Oppenheim’s work — his incredibly delightful 2009 deconstruction of Shakespeare’s classic, Hamlet, Shut Up, among other things a masterpiece of physical comedy.

Here, the riffs — lacking the bite as well as the smart tonic rhythms that the best of British performers execute so well – utterly fail to amuse. Pressman’s contemporary American aura seems especially ill-matched to the material. Other characters – a number of whom are realized by performers I’ve seen turn in quality work elsewhere – are here as dimensionless as the lines they deliver. The best work is done by Bellomo, who plays it straight against the absurdity, and Simon, whose bisexual commando comes closest to satisfying the demands of camp.

Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Ave., Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., July 6,13, 20, 7 p.m. No perf. July 4. Through August 2. (310) 281-8337, sacredfools.org