Taking risks 2nd Story’s Diatribe hits, but Garden misses BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

In a brave move for what is usually a risk-free summer season of staged laffs, 2nd Story Theatre is trusting us to be good sports about a little theater experiment (through September 11). Batting .500, they are following up an early one-act play by Harry Kondoleon with a later accomplishment in black comedy, hoping that we’ll be entertained and edified by the difference.

The practice play is the 1982 The Fairy Garden, and the better accomplishment is Love Diatribe, written 10 years later. As director Ed Shea explains to the audience in introducing the evening, the earlier play touching upon AIDS is a bitter and cynical excursion, in contrast with the later play’s affirmation. Being positive could not have had more ironic significance, since the playwright died three years afterward.

Both plays employ the coy deus ex machina of supernatural intervention, as though there’s something necessarily otherworldly about anything working out for the good in this life.

Love Diatribe takes the been-there, suffered-that starting point of a dysfunctional family and bursts through the boundaries of stereotype expectations with very funny specificity. Sandy (Rae Mancini) has returned home after tiring of a brief marriage with a health-food guru. Her brother Orin (Wayne Kneeland) has also done so after the maybe-suicide of his troubled girlfriend, which apparently has puzzled more than upset him.

As for the parents, they’re worthy of a spinoff sitcom — especially in these wacky, hilariously inhabited incarnations. As Dennis, the father, Jim Sullivan immediately enraptures us with a lengthening litany of complaints that ends with his leaving the room for one of his numerous daily sitz baths. The man does not appreciate reality orientation, as when Orin points out that threatening your employers with a steak knife, however dull, might conceivably have something to do with not being fully valued in the workplace.

Similarly, if their mother, Gerry (Margaret Melozzi), were any more twisted, she’d screw into the floor at every step. We meet her when she returns home from nursing all day in tight shoes because her comfortable ones keep getting stolen at the hospital. There, dying people begging for her help are by now just an annoying background drone. Whether Gerry is demanding that people rub her sore feet or fetch her a cold drink — "The ginger ale is mine!" — Melozzi maintains a hapless charm that’s impossible to hate anymore than you could hate a Godzilla-sized Raggedy Ann doll on a PMS rampage.

Kneeland serves skillfully as our exasperated stand-in amidst this psychological mayhem. Mancini co-hosts us well, self-centered but not so smug as to put us off. There are more walking wounded, such as the helpful next-door neighbor (Joan Batting) who all but brushes Gerry’s teeth for her in desperation for human contact. Her slow-witted son Mike thinks he’s in love with Sandy, but Richard Ring wisely gives him an assertive rather than a pathetic presence.

The supernatural part comes in the form of Frieda, buoyantly played by Lara Hakeem. Before the playwright arbitrarily switches realities on us, she is pretending to be an exchange student with both a rap about the power of love for people to save themselves and one another and a love potion shortcut for the same. Confusingly plotted, Love Diatribe seems to have started out with the playwright’s hard-won conclusion plus a McGuffin where convincing storytelling should be. Perhaps the hardest task in creative writing is to make the obvious appear original and the truthful appear transparent. The play puts telling ahead of showing, but the enjoyable performances almost make up for that.

The less said about the second play, The Fairy Garden, the better. The main reason for it being here is to demonstrate that the playwright grew up emotionally before he died of AIDS in 1995, at 39. A bickering gay couple (Joe Henderson and Steve Palmer) and a catty female friend (Paula Faber) who married well seem more like life-size microscope specimens than developed characters. The one-act is packed with more gay stereotypes than the Village People, and inhabitants both bent and straight seem to be competing for Olympic medals in narcissism. Even a wish-granting fairy (Laura Sorensen) — fairy, get it? — is out mainly for herself, here primarily as a metaphor for the lotus-eating, phone-number-exchanging fairyland of New York in the early ’80s, which Kondoleon presciently saw as doomed.

This combination of plays may not succeed, but how commendable that the attempt was made. After a few years of introducing its East Bay subscribers to fare that is meatier than easily digested comedies, 2nd Story Theatre has come to credit its audiences with minds as well as funny bones.