Diners’ club John Kuntz serves smorgasbord in Fully Committed BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Fully Committed By Becky Mode. Directed by Spiro Veloudos. Set by Skip Curtiss. Lighting by Robert Cordella. Sound by Dewey Dellay. With John Kuntz. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through December 23.

In one way, it sounds like an actor’s dream job: the phone never stops ringing. Unfortunately, it’s not a director or your agent calling. Sam, the underemployed thespian of Fully Committed, mans the reservations line at a much-in-demand Manhattan eatery where the rich, the famous, and the just obnoxious shrilly insist on booking a table to enjoy "jicama-poached Scottish wood squab" or something "with hyssop oil on a bed of wild ramps."

Writer Becky Mode and original star Mark Setlock had both worked for Manhattan celebrity chef David Bouley, and they cooked up the characters, whose resemblances to non-fictional foodies are doubtless strictly unintentional. The gimmick of the play is that the actor playing the harassed Sam also plays everyone else — some 40 restaurant personnel, badgering reservation seekers, a couple of relatives, even the ratings-guide-producing Zagats. It’s a tour de force that Setlock introduced locally in a 2000 co-production of Broadway in Boston and the Huntington Theatre Company, whose Nicholas Martin helmed the original Off Broadway staging. Now Lyric Stage Company honcho Spiro Veloudos, who also directs, gets the ingenious idea to serve as the troupe’s holiday offering chameleonic John Kuntz as the channeling actor. After all, the show is set in December, the swank eatery’s airless basement decorated with a few sad strings of Christmas lights. And among other traumas, Sam is dealing with his recently widowed dad’s meek beseechings about whether he’ll make it home for the holiday.

Fully Committed (the title is a pretentious term for all-booked-up) is more delicious than a lot of its imperious but insecure chef’s menu sounds (though it does descend into recurring tastelessness in one incident meant to indicate just how shitty poor Sam’s job is). And if the play is as light as a gossip soufflé, it’s not without its soupçon of pathos, which Kuntz delivers, and its dessert of revenge. Moreover, between its dotty pocket portrayals of the divas of cuisine and the gustatorily desperate of Manhattan, the production neatly traces the arc of Sam’s slightly troubling journey toward the air of "entitlement" his agent thinks will make him more attractive in the equally vainglorious world of theater and get him out of some East Side Escoffier’s basement.

The play was tailored to the unassuming but mimic-savvy Setlock’s talents, and his characters (and accents) were more precisely delineated than Kuntz’s, too many of whose personae are manic. But surprisingly given an actor as distinctive as Kuntz, who is best known for his own one-man amalgams of eccentricity, the Lyric production is anchored by an aptly indistinctive Sam, the craziness reserved for his torturers, both in house and out. And revisiting the play, one sees more clearly how tough an assignment Fully Committed is, between orchestrating the phone negotiations and rendering all of the characters, including the 39 who aren’t really there, physically palpable. Kuntz not only manages the dance but, for the most part, makes it look natural, whether he’s buzzing glumly back and forth between the main switchboard and the tyrannical chef’s buzzing and flashing private phone, getting lost in hip-swiveling little cakewalks of triumph when someone other than he lands in the soup, or playing verbal tennis games between his own nice guy and his besiegers, from the snooty French maître d’ to haute-seeking diners from the Upper East Side to the Mafia.

There’s Carol Ann Rosenstein Fishburn, whom maître d’ Jean-Claude won’t talk to because she has "a face lahk a dog." Kuntz plays her with arms extended into agitated little Cheerios of the fingers. There’s Bryce, the over-the-top aide to Naomi Campbell, who wants a vegan tasting menu and to send over the supermodel’s own flattering lightbulbs. He’s got both arms spread to the ends of the desk and his face, it would seem, halfway up the phone line. There’s the hysterical Mrs. Sebag, who hyperventilates into a bag when her previously made reservation cannot be confirmed. There’s the quietly gravel-voiced Mafioso who wants someone to serenade his parents with their favorite tune, "The Lady Is a Tramp." And those are just a few of the personae who emerge fully blown from the wires, including the laconic, smirking Chef, who calls to mind a less likable Paul Reubens.

That Kuntz can deliver a crate of crazies comes as no surprise. What’s more impressive is how touchingly he plays the depressed Sam, who’s just trying to keep himself together as he trudges toward one of life’s hopeful corners. With Fully Committed following his two seasons as Crumpet the disaffected Macy’s elf in David Sedaris’s The Santaland Diaries, the actor is starting to look like our local repository of holiday-employment hell. Next year, he’ll probably turn up as Bob Cratchit.