THEATRE By Addison DeWitt

Thin Material Makes Imperfect Show

A review of the Imperfect Theater Company's production of Sorrows of Stephen, which runs through Jan. 14 at USC's BTW Lab Theater (1400 Wheat St.).

The first show of the New Year is the Imperfect Theater Company's second trip, following its successful launch in 2006. Company founder and director Stephen Kelsey is devoted to doing "little" shows that never quite found their place in the theatrical limelight, hence the current Sorrows of Stephen at the BTW Lab Theater.

Peter Parnell's play is a whimsical conceit illustrating that old maxim of what might happen if your nose is "always in a book." It's sort of a riff on that old question that English teachers like to pose, the one that started, "In literature, as in life… ." Our hapless hero is one Stephen Hurt, a young Manhattanite who is inexplicably devoted to Goethe ‹ mainly his vaguely autobiographical Sorrows of Young Werther, one of the wellsprings of German Romanticism in the 18th century.

It's all well and good to have literary heroes, but Stephen's is surely a strange one: Werther was so unlucky in love that he winds up shooting himself at the book's conclusion. Determined to fulfill his romantic destiny ‹ i.e., misery ‹ he is abandoned by his girlfriend as the show opens, and things go downhill from there as he finds himself falling in love (or so he thinks) with the fiancée of his disc jockey best friend.

To call this play slight is to build it up. It's so gossamer thin there's barely anything there. I don't know if Parnell was inspired by Stephen Sondheim's Company (1970), but the structure of this show, which dates from the '70s, is quite similar to Sondheim's with vignettes and skits taking the place of fully fleshed out scenes. Not to mention the Manhattan milieu, a moneyed and cultured one at that. Add to that the bittersweet mood of rueful romance and all that is missing is music, which would have helped a great deal since the little episodes tend to peter out with very little payoff.

Kelsey has a good cast to work with. Our less-than-heroic hero is played by Kevin Bush, who uses his trademark goofiness to comic effect. He is a little flightier than need be ‹ which, when you think about it, might give a whole other context to Stephen's notable lack of success with the ladies. His best friend is played by Andre Rogers. Vicky Saye Henderson is the betrothed Stephen attempts to poach. A mysteriously recurring Bum is in the person of Lee O. Smith. Kim Harne does a version of the lady cab driver from On the Town so well that one waits for her to break into a chorus of "Come Up to My Place." Larry Hembree gets a lot of mileage out of his tuxedo as an over-the-top opera queen and officious Plaza concierge. Ellen Rodillo-Fowler is a waitress who serves up herself as the house special. Kewpie-faced Emily Bennett is the departing girlfriend at the opening.

The director also designed a cleverly three-dimensional, metropolitan set that's more accurate than the playwright's geography, which suggests he'd never been to New York. The literary allusions (operatic, too) make Sorrows of Stephen flatter the audience into believing that they are partaking in intelligent entertainment. I guess they are, but more good old-fashioned laughs, even of a lowly nature, would not have been amiss. But then, it is called the Imperfect Theater Company, after all.

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