Theater with a hole in the center

Imagine a bowl of Cheerios. You can add a lot to that little cereal bowl. You can splash it with the freshest, best-tasting milk available. You can sprinkle on as much sugar as your insulin levels can absorb. You can even garnish it with fresh-picked strawberries, sweet blueberries or perfectly-ripened bananas.

But, even after all of that, all you really have is a bowl of Cheerios. It may taste good, and you may love strawberries, but the core of your meal is a classic yet unremarkable bowl of bland oat circles.

Such is the case with the South Coast Repertory production of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” which, in Stoppard’s typical style, questions reality by presenting the audience with multiple versions of it.

Like the venerable bowl of Cheerios, his play is technically excellent. The dialogue is quick, funny and clever. The conflicts are real and heart-rending. The performances are first-rate and appropriately varied.

There is a lot of garnish in Stoppard’s script, but the core of the play is a simple story of adultery. In Stoppard’s own words, much of the play is “Did she or didn’t she?”

She did, as did he, and the rest of the play asks us to sympathize with these characters who cheat, cheat again and move on with their lives as if nothing happened.

The central story has all the flavor of that bowl of Cheerios. One usually expects more from a living author whose plays are already being taught in high-school English classes.

That said, director Martin Benson has flavored his play perfectly. From the first line, Benson sets a brilliant pace that allows his audience to access the characters ? laugh with their joys and cry with their wounds ? while simultaneously avoiding becoming bogged down in Stoppard’s sometimes dense swamp of words. Benson’s direction finds the matter in the script and appropriately works around much of the art.

Doing the heavy lifting for Benson is an extraordinary cast.

As Henry, the adulterer who becomes the cuckold, Bill Brochtrup sets the pace and the emotion of the play. Henry’s character is difficult. He is a romantic with an unshakable faith in monogamy.

But like a soldier who hates war, he keeps a mistress who is herself married. Brochtrup sensitively delves into the nuances of his complex character and allows the audience to sympathize despite his moral hypocrisy.

Natacha Roi as Annie, the double cheater, similarly targets her character’s complexities. She fluidly switches roles, sometimes at breakneck speed, from faithful wife to sex-starved mistress to social activist, and back. Annie is both hedonistic and idealistic, and Roi effectively melds these two facets of her character.

The rest of the cast plays their smaller roles with a strong sense of character and drive. Martin Kildare’s pure emotion as the unfortunate Max is heartbreaking. Pamela J. Gray is strong as the cheated on and cheating Charlotte. Although they struggle with their Scottish accents, David Barry Gray as Billy and McCaleb Burnett as Brodie find a real sensitivity in their roles. One of the sub-themes of “The Real Thing” is that no one is purely anything. Good people cheat and bad people work for good causes. Gray and Burnett strike this chord with skill.

“The Real Thing” is a well-written play with a bland heart. The best of that play is very well done at South Coast. The production hits all the right notes, avoids many of the show’s pitfalls, and delivers the central theme, which questions the reality and motivations behind any person’s actions.

The garnish is very good, the fruit is ripe, the milk is fresh, but the play is still just Cheerios.