THEATER: In pursuit of happier days

Don’t confuse “The Pursuit of Happiness” — the world premiere comedy at the Laguna Playhouse — with the current Will Smith movie of approximately the same name (the flick spells “Happiness” with a y).

The “pursuit” on the local stage centers around a middle-aged woman’s desperate attempts to get her daughter enrolled in college — even if it kills them both and vaporizes mama’s marriage in the process.

Written by Richard Dresser — previously represented in Laguna by “Gun-Shy,” “Wonderful World” and “Rounding Third” — “Pursuit” is the second increment in a Dresser trilogy about happiness in America. The play was specially commissioned by the local theater.

Dresser has created five characters — actually one character and four caricatures — to spin this story about middle-class dissatisfaction which borders on the farcical.

Actually, it crosses that border on several occasions, to the gleeful delight of its audience. Annie (the remarkable Deedee Rescher) is the frustrated mom striving to get her disinterested daughter Jodi (Joanna Strapp) enrolled in an institution of higher learning, even though the deadline for doing so is long past.

Jodi, reasoning that college never made her mother a happier person, would just as soon pass and flip burgers for the homeless.

There’s not much support coming from the girl’s father, Neil (Matt Reidy), a robotic type mired in a dead-end job and no better example of college-educated prominence. Neil gets his jollies from stalking the pests in his garden with a stun gun.

These three are normalcy personified, however, in comparison to Dresser’s other two characters — Spud (Preston Maybank), a college admissions director, biweekly alcoholic and an old friend of Annie’s; and Tucker (Tim Cummings), a rumpled nebbish whose work cubicle adjoins Neil’s, giving them a tenuous basis for friendship.

Under the lively direction of Andrew Barnicle, “Pursuit” brings these disparate characters to a goofy form of life, building a marriage-threatening crisis from the bare bones of a flimsy premise.

In this respect, the show quite resembles “The Sleeper,” another Barnicle-directed comedy from the playhouse’s previous season.

Rescher, blessed with the juiciest role, runs with it all the way to the bank. Her college-obsessed mother figure is just familiar enough to be recognizable, and her sheer determination to live vicariously through her daughter is screamingly funny.

Strapp, the only cast member not charged with pushing the show over the boundary into farce, is delightfully realistic in her honest depiction of undecided youth. She balances her life choices carefully, as those around her careen into roadblocks and each other.

One might assume Reidy’s father character is on tranquilizers at the outset, so “normal” is his performance compared to Rescher’s. But this contrast is quite intentional, and Reidy underplays with aplomb, saving his emphatic actions for the proper moment.

Maybank’s downwardly mobile character (don’t ask how he got the nickname “Spud”) and Cummings’ lifeless loser both blossom at the prospect of injecting a little romance into their terminally drab lives.

Both characters may be speed bumps along the play’s highway, but both actors thrust into overdrive in their interpretations.

Set designer Tom Buderwitz has created a bastion of normalcy for the family’s home, bolstered on each side by sliding sub-settings to serve the episodic script.

Paulie Jenkins’ lighting and Julie Keen’s costumes (for “the present United States of America”) also serve the production splendidly.

It’s always — well, usually — a pleasure to be present at the birth of a new play, and the Laguna Playhouse is offering this singular experience with “The Pursuit of Happiness.”

Here’s hoping you don’t recognize anyone you know, or especially yourself, in the process.