Theater Review : Life Passes Everyone by in Slow, Blurry ‘Last Drive-In’

“The Last Drive-In,” now at the Tribune Theatre, is about loss.

The young characters feel as if they’re losing their past. The viewer feels as if he’s losing the present--nearly two hours of it, to be exact.

Joni Mitchell sang: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?”

Her famous lyric (from her 1970 hit “Big Yellow Taxi,” cited in the program) serves as an epigraph for this muddled memoir of Orange County youth of the 1970s and early 1980s. Writer-director Terry McNicol also quotes the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Miller and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

To a generation weaned on classic rock, “The Last Drive-In” may seem a welcome nostalgia trip. The back-seat groping and shared joints of 15 years ago seem quaint contrasted with the problems facing young people today.

But was hanging out ever this dull?

McNicol, who grew up in Orange County, sets the play in a drive-in theater--supposedly one of the last of its kind in Orange County--where three buddies in their early- to mid-20s are half-watching the 1983 movie “The Big Chill.” But their real entertainment consists of drinking beer, ogling girls and shooting the breeze.

The characters are familiar types. Steve (Prem Shah) is the ladies’ man. Tom (J.T. Beers) is the quiet, 25-year-old loner. Donald (Rick Lawhorn) is the geek desperate for female company.

Theirs is a fairly uneventful existence, from what we glean. Donald grows sick from beer and throws up into a tub of popcorn--the evening’s big comic highlight. Tom mutters unconvincingly over the way rampant overdevelopment has wrecked Orange County. Steve meets and quickly scores with a flirty slip of a girl named Laura (Darri Kristin).

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Material this thin might have worked in a slice-of-life drama, but McNicol’s writing keeps the characters about as interesting as stale beer.

Some sort of conflict--perhaps with Randy (Christopher Michael Egger), a leather-jacketed tough who briefly appears--might have helped. With the exception of Donald, whom Lawhorn gives the brain of Beavis and the voice of Butt-head, this group is the most subdued, slang-free bunch of young adults you’ve ever seen. The generally flat, uninflected performances don’t help, either.

But there’s a deeper problem. “The Last Drive-In” is supposedly an elegy to McNicol’s Orange County childhood. Yet this play could just as well take place in Marin County or Macon County. The writing never paints a vivid picture of Southern California life during the period--life that found such colorful expression in the writings of Thomas Pynchon and others. If McNicol can’t evoke what Orange County was like then, why should we care?

The only remarkable feature of the sparse set, credited to the cast and crew, is the back half of a red hatchback sprouting from the upstage wall.

Boxy as it is, the car probably offers occupants more room than do the Tribune’s balcony seats, some of which offer scarcely enough headroom for an adult male of 5 foot 10.

The tiny theater has undergone a recent make-over, but a lot more work remains before the space could be considered hospitable.

* “The Last Drive-In,” Tribune Theatre, 116 1/2 W. Wilshire Ave., Fullerton. Friday through Sunday, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 6. (714) 525-3403. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Steve: Prem Shah

Donald: Rick Lawhorn

Tom: J.T. Beers

Orangeman: Steven Lamprinos

Foxy Valley Chick: Jennifer Bishton

Randy: Christopher Michael Egger

Claudia: Jennifer E. Marchant

Laura: Darri Kristin

Cop: Nicholas Smith

Skippy: Jetta

A Revolving Door Production. Written and directed by Terry McNicol. Produced by Nick Boicourt Jr. and Steven Lamprinos. Sound design: Mike Koebler. Set design: cast and crew. Lights: Prem Shah.