Imagine a weekend in the country hosted by Noel Coward and Anton Chekhov. That may give you some idea of the changing dispositions of the characters who occupy Donald Margulies' The Country House. As the recent Broadway play unfolded in its regional premiere, I was whipsawing between contemplations of Coward's frolicsome Hay Fever and Chekhov's considerably more mordant The Seagull. Not necessarily irreconcilable inspirations, but Margulies' genial comedy only finds its way to a so-so state of affairs.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Dinner With Friends, a trenchant drama about the symbiosis between married couples, Margulies creates a more playful atmosphere in The Country House. That house is in the Berkshires, where notable performers often gather to renew their stage creds at venerable summer theater festivals. And that house is ruled over by Anna Patterson, the matriarch of an acting family and a Broadway star, as she says, when there were Broadway stars.
Anna is prone to swooping entrances, self-involvement, and a blurry conflation of life on the stage and in the real world. In this she resembles Judith Bliss, the flighty retired actress in Coward's Hayfever, but also Irina Arkadina, the glamorous Russian actress now past her prime in Chekhov's The Seagull. And all are part of the household melanges of relatives, friends, and lovers of uneasy chemistries.
This is a well-tested theatrical formula, but where Margulies falters is in the surprisingly wan efforts at crafting smart remarks worthy of these characters. "You never got the acting bug?" asks a character of Anna's granddaughter. "You mean like the plague?" The audience knows it's a laugh line and mildly obliges, as it does to references to such easy japes as gluten and Lifetime movies.
Even as the play veers into some somber and fraught situations, it brings surprisingly little that's fresh to the party. But TheatreWorks, under Robert Kelley's steady direction, makes sure it is a fashionable party. Andrea Bechert's living room set looks move-in ready, and B. Modern's costumes befit these characters of various generations and personalities but all of comfortable circumstances.
The reason for this get-together is not a happy one. It's the one-year anniversary of the death of Anna's daughter Kathy, herself a beautiful and successful actress until cancer crept in. The gathering was expected to be a family affair, with Kathy's widowed older husband Walter, their teenage daughter Susie, and Anna's sad-sack son Elliot in attendance. But solemnity is undone with the arrival of two unexpected guests.
Walter, a schlocky movie director, has brought his new girlfriend to the gathering. Nell is young, beautiful, vivacious, and thoroughly resented by Kathy's direct kin. On the other hand, everyone is quite pleased that young, handsome, and vivacious TV star Michael has, in a plot contrivance, found himself bunked out on the living room sofa. Both have some connections to the immediate family, as Michael once played a callow youth in love with Anna's older woman in Shaw's Candida, and Nell is the long-lost love of perennial loser Elliot.
Kimberly King supplies an estimable performance as the sympathetically narcissistic Anna, an actress from the old school of charm and glamor. Indeed, the entire cast is in tune with their characters, including Marcia Pizzo's effortlessly seductive Nell, Jason Kuykendall's charismatically hunky Michael, Gary Martinez's Hollywood hotshot Walter, and Rosie Hallett's sulking Susie.
While Anna is at the center of the action, the most compelling character is Elliot, who inherited none of the family's talents, looks, or social grace. As Elliot, Stephen Muterspaugh creates a character that draws both our commiseration for the constant dismissal from his family and our contempt for his loser mentality. Much like Konstantin in The Seagull, he's an aspiring playwright whose work is ridiculed, most fiercely by his mother, who thinks she's the villain in his writing. It is Elliot's angry eruption in the second act that finally gives The Country House a heft beyond middling drawing-room comedy.
The Country House will run through Sept. 20 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are $19-$80. Call (650) 463-1960 or go to theatreworks.org.