‘Summer Vacation’ needs more reality

There's at least one scene that makes Off-Strip Production's take on Christopher Durang's "Betty's Summer Vacation" worth seeing.

There's this mother, Mrs. Siezmagraff, who's frantic to prove to these three imaginary but physically real voices that her daughter, because of an unhappy childhood, isn't really responsible for cutting off a man's private parts.

So she becomes a no-nonsense attorney who interrogates her daughter, then interrogates herself to prove she's been an evil mother. Then she produces a secret witness, an Irish housekeeper, who proves, much to the mother's chagrin, that Mrs. Siezmagraff was indeed responsible for her disturbed daughter's hatred of penises.

The attorney, the mother and the housekeeper all are played, with nonstop lunacy and realism, by Barbara King. The moment is a mad aria to a mad Gotterdammerung of a play, and it earns the enthusiastic round of applause that caps it.

The plot throws six neurotic characters in the same vacation cottage.

Betty (Stacia Zinkevich) is the wholesome one who always tries to do good. Trudy (Penni Mendez) is the sexually abused daughter who can't get over the horrors of childhood (and adulthood, for that matter).

Keith (Mario Mendez) is the nerd who stays in his room most of the time doing something that involves blood. Buck (Drew Yonemori) is the adolescently brain-wired stud who lives in his pants.

Steve McMillan is the flasher who finds easy romance in the household. And Dean Binger, Cindy Lee Stock and Joel Wayman are the voices that serve as the laughtrack -- until they get bored and decide to make an appearance by crashing through the walls.

Durang's script hits too many easy targets, but there are a good number of laughs. When director Rob Kastil finds the appropriate tone -- particularly during King's moments -- the show is bliss. McMillan makes for an uncomfortably believable, yet humorous, flasher. And Mendez comes across as an exposed nerve. You see the emotional scars and yet still chuckle.

It's unfortunate that too many characters are played as if they are in on the joke. Zinkevich's Betty is robotic, and Mendez's Keith is one-note. Too often, the attempts to punch up the yuks upstage the core of the play's psychological truth. Durang needs a strong layer of reality for his humor to take hold.

Michael Morse and Patrick Drawyer's cartoon set gives the script a "Pee-wee's Playhouse" sensibility. It's a perfect backdrop for a play about adults who are too childlike vulnerable to deal with American society's insanities.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.