STAGE REVIEW : Bunzel’s ‘Buick’ Runs Well, but Steering Needs Work

Something’s terribly wrong in John Bunzel’s Southern California. The family has gone to pot--literally and figuratively. Its sacred temple is the ranch-style home with pool, two-car garage and credit cards. Mom’s an ogre, Dad’s a wimp. Life is the pursuit of sappiness and man’s inalienable right to self-destruct.

Is that any way to run a life? Maybe not, but it’s a good way to ruin one. Or two. Or five.

That’s the message, loud and clear, from Bunzel’s “Death of a Buick” at the Pasadena Playhouse. The Hopkins family--Mom, Dad, sons Benji and Jack--are not Ozzie and Harriet. Another son, Jason, has recently died in a car crash.

Since this is Christmas, 1988, Mom finds Jason’s timing rudely inconvenient. Dad thinks there was a message in it and tries to emulate his late son by running Mom’s prized ’56 Buick off a cliff. He fails, but does succeed in leaving behind the world’s longest suicide note.

Younger son Benji, who finds it, thinks it’s a masterpiece. Older son Jack finds it pathetic. Jack’s goal in life is to remain perfectly calm with a little help from Corona beer, marijuana and Valium. Benji, who is compiling a scrapbook of Jason’s obituaries, is camera-ready for every family crisis.

Not a fun group, but often a funny one in a demoralizing, me-generational way, particularly when Bunzel’s brush is dipped in cyanide and he paints this polarized family portrait in cartoonish strokes that waspishly hit home (double-entendre intended). But he doesn’t do it enough, or go far enough when he does.

The dialogue spits and sputters, burning some acid holes along the way, but it is also capable of duds (“It’s hard work putting Pierre to rest.” “You should have seen him when he was hungry.” Whaaaaat?) and semi-duds (“Are you going to eat dinner with your cap?” “No, I thought I’d use a fork”).

Despite Bunzel’s setting of the play in the near future, this family feels like it belongs more in the immediate past. We’ve known for some time now that affluence distorts and that we should say no to drugs. America has had a recent fitness fit, signs of which are nowhere in this play (unless Mom’s tennis game counts as reference).

In many ways, Bunzel’s people are related to those who inhabit Adele Shank’s cycle of hyper-real California plays (beginning with “Sunset/Sunrise”) or David Henry Hwang’s “Family Devotions.” One keeps expecting their anger and bleakness to get deeper or events more explosive. But beyond the unplanned death of a poodle (the infamous Pierre), there is little action and all of it seems to skim the surface of potentially greater possibilities. Mom, Dad and the boys are ultimately stick figures, isolated in space.

Admittedly, this absence of dimension is part of the message and partly built into the style of the play--wherein everything is exaggerated to make a point--but it also comes from a certain directorial blandness. Responsibility for this weakness presumably must be shared by Steven Keats, who did most of the staging, and Don Amendolia, who took over when personal matters forced Keats to leave. Or it may have been caused by this very duality of leadership.

Richard Sanders is a delicious heap of failings as the slightly out-of-shape, tender, abstracted and ineffectual Dad, but Betsy Palmer’s Mom is too harsh. It’s not that this Mom is intended to win us over, but that the portrait of a hard-bitten virago devoid of everything but anger cheats the character of a certain richness. This woman’s fury comes from feelings repressed, not nonexistent. The outward equanimity’s there, but we’d like to see more anguish and more rage behind it. Something has to lead up to her unraveling at the end.

Jack (Xander Berkeley) and Benji (Doug McKeon) as drawn are more featureless than their parents, and it is to McKeon’s credit that he manages a winning cheerful-at-all-costs demeanor that is in perfect contrast to the oddness of Benji’s morbid preoccupations.

Berkeley has a tougher time convincing us of Jack’s layabout mentality, mortified at the prospect of going cold turkey when his mother cuts off his supply of charge cards and accounts. There’s a “for rent” sign on this character, a vacancy Bunzel needs to fill. Scott Burkholder in brief appearances as a delivery boy nabs some of the show’s biggest laughs.

A filmed preamble to the play is amusing, and Stephen Bennett has well designed and lit the spacious/sterile California ranch-style kitchen/living/dining room set.

George T. Mitchell’s costumes are appropriate if subdued, and Jon Gottlieb’s offstage cars and crashes provide their own vivid scenarios, but the loudest bang we need to hear must come from the play itself. While its final Southern California touch is admirable, it isn’t the bang we mean.

Performances at 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena, run Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 5 and 9 p.m., Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m., through June 5. Tickets: $17-$25; (818) 356-PLAY.