THEATER : Vanguard Opens With an OK ‘Gillian’ : There Will No Doubt Be Less Saccharine in the New Fullerton Ensemble’s Next Production

The Vanguard Theatre Ensemble made its debut over the weekend with a not-bad revival of Michael Brady’s “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday,” an old-fashioned play that wears its bittersweet heart on its sleeve.

This 1984 drama about a grieving widower’s renewal after a long period of mourning following the accidental death of his wife may not be to all tastes.

If you like earnest sentimentality, predictable characters and bromides about the eternal verities of life, then “To Gillian” is made to order for you. If you prefer less saccharine material, you might wait for the Vanguard’s next production, Shaw’s satirical romance “Arms and the Man.”

In either case, this maiden outing tenders the new troupe’s credentials as a full-fledged member of Orange County’s little league of storefront theaters.

The performance level during a press preview Thursday was as good as you’ll find at similarly ambitious but more-established amateur companies such as the Alternative Repertory Theatre, the Way Off Broadway Playhouse (both in their fifth seasons) and the Backstage Theatre (in its third).

Despite the soapy script--or perhaps because of it--”To Gillian” presents a considerable casting challenge. It demands fine ensemble acting from seven players, including two teen-age girls (no small requirement for any troupe), just to package the story in hankies.

Also, the central role of the widower must be filled by an actor capable of negotiating the character’s bathetic moods with a certain Alan Alda-ish lightness and yet with enough weight to dramatize a genuine sense of despair. If not, the whole schmaltzy play can bog down in maudlin gloom.

Tom Dudley manages to keep the lugubriousness at bay some of the time with a studied performance as David, the stargazing professor who has left his college job and hidden himself away on a New England island where he and his wife, Gillian, used to spend their summers.

Dudley has the gaunt and weary look of someone long haunted by sorrow. Yet he can sometimes convey what Brady’s script also calls for--a dry, playful irony that occasionally leavens David’s distracted absorption with memories of Gillian, who magically appears as a full-bodied spirit in the midst of a play not otherwise supernatural.

Gillian (Melissa Rivers) wants David to give up the grieving that at one point nearly drove him to suicide. His withdrawal is a guilt-ridden cop-out, she contends, destructive not only to him but to everyone around him. “Life is for extravagance,” says the intrepid Gillian, formerly a globe-trotting anthropologist whose death resulted from one small extravagance too many. (She climbed the mast of their boat and fell off.)

Others in the play want David to give up the grieving, too. They include his and Gillian’s only child, 16-year-old Rachel (Tamara Mello), who feels emotionally shut out by her father’s prolonged withdrawal; Gillian’s sister Esther (Wendy Gunkel) and her husband Paul (Michael David), who have arrived at his beachfront cottage on what would have been Gillian’s 37th birthday in hopes of fixing him up with a younger woman they’ve brought along; and, of course, the woman--a former student, now a single mother, named Kevin (Wendy Abas)--who’s in the market for a sensitive man.

The only person not especially interested in changing David’s life is his next-door neighbor, 16-year-old Cindy (Tonya Steele), a friend of Rachel who has developed a crush on him.

For all its psychology (Esther is a psychiatrist), feminism (“You want Sister Theresa of the Little Flowers, or a real woman, with real passions?”) and cultural literacy (it ranges from Greek mythology to Borscht Belt jokes), “Gillian” never comes to grips with anything except the idea that all’s well that ends well.

The production, however, is not at fault. Except for an occasional awkwardness in the blocking, director Terry Gunkel has staged the play with minimum fuss. And he draws variously appealing, though somewhat uneven, performances from the company.

The uncredited setting works. A screen door and a porch with white wicker furniture aptly suggest the summer cottage. The beach is made of real sand. Costumes and lighting are also fine.

Moreover, the Vanguard’s airy theater is comfortable. About 50 upholstered seats skirt the two front edges of the “To Gillian” set, creating a deep-thrust playing space that can be reconfigured for each show.

‘To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday’

David: Tom Dudley

Rachel: Tamara Mello

Cindy: Tonya Steele

Kevin: Wendy Abas

Paul: Michael David

Esther: Wendy Gunkel

Gillian: Melissa Rivers

A Vanguard Theatre Ensemble production of a play by Michael Brady. Directed by Terry Gunkel. Executive producer: Kevin Aratari. Lighting designer: Virginia Lynn Rudolph.

* Performances through March 28 at the Vanguard Theatre, College Business Park, Suite A, 699 S. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Performances Thursdays to Sundays at 8 p.m. Tickets: $14 (general); $12 (students). Information: (714) 526-8007.

THUMBS DOWN: Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy,” which was commissioned by South Coast Repertory and earned raves in its 1990 premiere on the SCR Mainstage, hasn’t fared as well in New York, where the play recently opened on Broadway in a new production.

The critics there took dead aim at Korder’s Mamet-style writing, rebuffing the opinion of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, which honored the writing with the first Ted Schmitt Award for outstanding new play.

In the most scathing review, Variety’s Jeremy Gerard scoffed that “Search and Destroy” was “an aimless work” of imitation Mamet and “deals out bloodless nihilism, phony as the fog that inevitably rolls out over the audience.”

Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News said the “neo-Mamet” production was superbly acted but “told us nothing we didn’t already know.” Worse, Korder “sees verbal facility as a form of machismo rather than a vehicle for illuminating character.”

Mel Gussow of the New York Times also couldn’t help noting the Mamet influence in his negative review: “The problem with the play is not so much that it speeds its plow over familiar terrain but that the sum is less than some of its parts.”

Gussow’s colleague, David Richards, who writes the paper’s Sunday View, disagreed. He called the play “a darkly compelling comedy” with “a fascinating tone” and said it was “suspenseful enough in its final minutes to have you inching up to the edge of your seat.”

But the New Yorker’s Edith Oliver more or less summed up the majority opinion: “The pervasive slapstick cynicism that underlies (the) story has little to do with genuine satire, if that is what Mr. Korder had in mind, though at its best it occasionally has something to do with comedy.”