DATE: Friday, November 14, 1997             TAG: 9711120171

SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS     PAGE: 07   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: THEATER REVIEW 

SOURCE: Montague Gammon III 

                                            LENGTH:   65 lines

``ROMANTIC COMEDY'' IS CLEVER, WORTHY OF ATTENTION

A couple of notable performances, and a script written with some remarkably clever turns, make the Little Theatre of Portsmouth production of ``Romantic Comedy'' worthy of attention.

Bernard Slade's play uses a familiar format. A superficial description of his plot - the romance between a man and woman who collaborate to write for Broadway - sounds much like ``They're Playing Our Song,'' a tale of two songwriters now at Little Theater of Norfolk.

In Slade's script, a mature and successful playwright, having gone through a dry spell after dissolving a long writing partnership, meets on his wedding day a young female schoolteacher who is an aspiring playwright. He takes her on as his new writing partner, though it's also obvious that they are infatuated with each other at their first meeting.

The rest of the play tracks the ups and downs of their professional partnership and their unspoken affection over some 14 or 15 years. Jason, the established author, got married as planned, while Phoebe later falls for and weds a fatuous reporter. Though the play is far from perfect, suffering now and again from wordiness, an unnecessary last scene, and an insistence on explaining the obvious, Slade is quite original in the way he plays with and twists the inevitable cliches of situation and dialogue that crop up.

Both the author and the actors are able to keep an audience in some suspense about how it all will turn out, repeatedly surprising the viewer with revelations about what has been going on in these two characters' offstage lives. The pair rarely behaves in obvious ways that would make the show facile, and it's rather a treat to predict wrongly what will happen next.

Slade is not above making a few jokes for his audience, from Jason's wife's surname to the odd literary reference, but his writing is commendably free of the gags that so often pass for wit. The laughs depend upon a more genuine and more intelligent humor proceeding out of the characters' natures, rather than from a sit-com writer's thesaurus of easy ironies.

It's easy to suspect that Slade doesn't know how good he can be. If he had ended the whole show one scene before he did, he could have been credited with something like brilliance.

Marti Craver's comic talents, which have enlivened any number of past Portsmouth shows, are put to very good use in the role of Phoebe. The first scene is almost entirely hers, where she delightfully plays the shy, unsophisticated school mar'm trying hard to be nonoplussed. Craver is consistently fun to watch, though her sharp sense of timing and comic nuance never quite gets the same workout during the rest of the show that her first scene provided. In the final two scenes she expands to show really impressive flashes of dramatic ability.

Another comedienne who perks up the show with each entrance is Portsmouth stalwart Alice Everhart, playing Jason's tart-tongues agent Blanche Dailey. Bill Abrams, as Jason, seems to be underplaying his role but for a couple of times when he relaxes into some broad physical comedy, and during his final scenes with Phoebe.

Everhart also designed the set, one of this theater's more successful such efforts recently, and Tom Falls directed. ILLUSTRATION: WANT TO GO?

What: ``Romantic Comedy,'' by Bernard Slade

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 14 and 15

Where: Little Theatre of Portsmouth at Wilson High, 1401 Elmhurst

Lane.

Tickets: 488-7866

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