STAGE REVIEW : ‘GHOST ON FIRE’ FUELS CURIOSITY

LA JOLLA â€”  We don’t have a more fluent playwright than Michael Weller. Not only is the talk good in “Ghost on Fireâ€� at the La Jolla Playhouse (with some points subtracted for speechifying), so is the sureness with which Weller tells his tale.

This is a big play--thick enough in character and incident to make a novel--but it doesn’t sag or go out of plumb. In nearly three hours of stage time, there wasn’t a moment when I wasn’t curious as to what the next line would be.

Obviously, this is a playwright who could make a good deal of money inventing stories for “them�--the networks, the studios. (Weller has in fact written the screenplays for “Ragtime� and “Hair.�) His hero is similarlyplaced, a youngish film director who parlayed five trashy “Movies of the Week� in Hollywood into a nervous breakdown.

Now he teaches film in New York, a cleaner way to make a living but so far from what he was born to do that he is approaching another crisis.

(Peter Zapp plays the director like a younger but no less fraught Jack Lemmon.)

“Ghost on Fire� is roughly the story of his return to his metier. It’s disappointing--because it’s unrealistic--that the director is able to make that return without compromise. It would have been more interesting to see him end up making a movie that wasn’t quite what he wanted to do, although a step up from yesterday’s dreck. The real world moves by inches. Playwright Weller has himself compromised here, in his need to provide his tale with a clear-cut and somewhat optimistic ending. It’s too bad, for one of the truths most effectively conveyed by this play is that it is a complicated world. My truth may tangle with yours; my liberation may be your loss.

The film maker isn’t alone in this play. We are equally concerned--and probably more--with his best friend from student days, a cameraman who didn’t walk out on “them� and who partly regrets it (William Russ). He is back in New York with a plan to mend the rift between them. What he doesn’t know is that he’s got a brain tumor.

If that sounds like soap opera, it has been known to happen in the real world, and one can believe it’s happening to this hip young guy as he tries to put a humorous face on his problems in finding the right word--or, finally, any word.

But then Weller gives him a wonderful stand-up monologue where he tells us, with the old glibness, what it’s like to be lying in a hospital bed grunting at your visitors. Literally, the moment couldn’t happen. But we credit it as one of those lies that the stage is empowered to tell in order to convey more of a situation than meets the eye. This is one play that’s very happy to be on the stage.

It knows how to include the audience in its game plan. Sometimes we sit back and watch; sometimes the characters come to us for consultation.

For instance, we hear from our film maker’s wife (Helen Shaver), who has a hard time putting an end to a sentence or completing a chapter in her own life. (One of the play’s preoccupations is the need in one’s 30s to put the past aside and to get on with whatever one is supposed to be doing. It is a biological clock that ticks more loudly for the people in “Ghost on Fire� than the reproductive one.)

We also share the hoodoos of the cameraman’s pill-popping wife (Holly Hunter), a Southerner who seems to have been driven crazy by the boundary-less “good life� in California. Again this character is a little too quickly redeemed by Weller, but we can believe her stress, her frantic need to register as a somebody with these upscale New Yorkers.

We also meet the philosopher who lives upstairs (Edward Zang). This absent-minded professor is actually thinking, a painful activity that he does not recommend to everyone. He is particularly distressed when an earnest actor (Timothy Shelton) becomes his disciple, speaks out against nuclear war and loses his job on a soap. But the actor feels positively born again; so what does a philosopher know?

I won’t describe the randy British doctor (James Hurdle) or the pouting film student with whom the director has been having an affair (Hannah Cox) or the semi-crooked Israeli millionaire who might finance the director’s movie (Jan Triska) or the old black man from Carolina (Bill Cobbs, in a wonderful performance). Each plays his role in a many-chambered story, and each provides his surprises and his inconsistencies. In terms of characters, Weller sets a good table.

His dialogue is strong too. The problems come when it ascends to bad rhetoric--speeches about life, art, truth, etc. that sound priggish even when it is understood that our director is a bit of a prig. One appreciates the willingness of these characters to exchange grown-up ideas, as also happens in real life, but there are too many attitudes struck.

One notices, too, the absolute sentimentality with which the characters look back on the days when they were younger and purer (much as in Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along,� earlier in the season at the La Jolla Playhouse). Being as aware and ironic as they all are, wouldn’t someone propose the notion that perhaps they are idealizing those golden days on campus? They will examine the notion of God, but the sanctity of their shared past is a given. A really risky play would put that up for scrutiny as well.

In the end, “Ghost on Fire� isn’t that. Its weight as a play is about that of “The Big Chill� as a movie, with some of the same themes floating about (friendship betrayed, time passing) and the same general air of literacy and intelligence about the dialogue. What the play has to “say� is less important than the people we meet--the Israeli’s “lady� for instance (Kary Lynn Vail). She looks like an expensive item bought and paid for until she warns the director not to patronize her: “I’m not into sarcasm.� Your ears prick up. There’s a person in there.

Weller draws from life, and director Timothy Near’s actors contribute their own touches, which will be even more lifelike when they slow down a little--opening night’s performance was too hyper even for characters in a tense intellectual Upper West Side milieu. Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s costumes observe that milieu precisely and Thomas Lynch’s revolving settings are nearly miraculous considering the small stage. “Ghost on Fire� is fluent on all sides.

‘GHOST ON FIRE’ Michael Weller’s play at the La Jolla Playhouse. Director Timony Near. Sets Thomas Lynch. Costumes Jennifer von Mayrhauser. Lighting Kent Dorsey. Music Michael S. Roth and Holly Near. Sound John Kilgore. Stage manager T. R. Martin. Assistant Director Michael Greif. Dialect coach Susan Leigh. Casting Stanley Soble, Jason La Padura, Richard Pagano. With Bill Cobbs, Hannah Cox, Holly Hunter, James Hurdle, William Russ, Helen Shaver, Timony Shelton, Jan Triska, Kary Lynn Vail, Brett Weir, Edward Zang, Peter Zapp. Plays through Aug. 31 at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday, with 2 p.m. matinees Thursday, Aug. 22 and 31. La Jolla Playhouse at the Warren Theatre, UCSD, Rupertus Way, La Jolla. (619) 452-3960.