When Zealotry Is Fun

Stage

PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED a shallow socialite, a newly converted religious zealot wants to bring her vision of God to all her friends——and the whole nation. But while proselytizing, she neglects her alcoholic husband and distressed daughter.

Ripped from today’s headlines? Not exactly. It’s Susan and God, a social comedy by Rachel Crothers, and it opened on Broadway 70 years ago. But it’s the kind of jewel Lamb’s Players Theatre likes to uncover and polish (August 10–September 23). And the script provides the tasty mix of humor and seriousness that director Robert Smyth loves to serve.

“Classically, it’s a comedy,” Smyth says, “but it has an awful lot of pathos.” Because Susan and her family are “way out of kilter,” finding the right tone is his major challenge. “There’s a real theatricality to the play, so the set is not going to be 100 percent realistic.” And although the play has been described as a satire, Smyth doesn’t see it that way. The fun, he says, is in the characters’ “sense of hypocrisy. In the end, even Susan sees that.”

Smyth tightened up the script, which originally ran more than three hours, and placed the play in 1939. He isn’t aiming to make Susan more timely by emphasizing parallels to current controversies over religion and evangelizing. “The real relevance,” he says, “is to our families today.” Susan is played by Sarah Zimmerman, who was a delight in Lamb’s popular 2005 production of Cold Comfort Farm.

LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE SEASONS have frequently been enriched by coproductions with other theater companies, notably the Berkeley Rep (like 2006’s Zorro in Hell), and another classy LJ-B collaboration is on tap. after the quake (July 24–August 26) is a Frank Galati adaptation of two short stories by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (the lower-case titles are his choice) about the catastrophic 1995 temblor that killed thousands of his countrymen, mostly in his home city of Kobe.

Murakami’s writing combines realism with magic and spiritualism, and Galati’s script and direction blend the naturalistic “honey pie,” in which a long-unrequited love evolves into a deeper relationship, with the mythological “super-frog saves tokyo,” a man’s fantasy about a giant amphibian who warns that Tokyo is menaced by a huge worm shaking the ground beneath. Galati is artistic director of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where he first staged quake in 2005. He won the 1990 Tony for his direction of The Grapes of Wrath, which had a successful 1989 run at La Jolla Playhouse on its way to Broadway.

ALAN AYCKBOURN has been called, fitting or not, England’s Neil Simon, mainly because both are prolific playwrights, and most of their works are comedies. Ayckbourn, however, is also noted for his ingenious structuring. For instance, The Norman Conquests, probably his most-performed work, is a trilogy of plays using the same six characters during a weekend in three different parts of a house, with each play’s entrances, exits and references matching the action of the other two.

In Communicating Doors, coming up at Cygnet Theatre (August 25–September 23), the gimmick is time travel. The title doors, in a hotel room, allow guests to zip back to the same room decades earlier. But not everyone. And not always to the same time period. Combine that with a convoluted plot about a man’s late-in-life confession of murdering two of his business partner’s wives, and the result could be hopeless confusion. But you can count on Ayckbourn to provide logic and laughter, and Cygnet to sweeten the plot.

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