THEATER REVIEW:Laughing with play, at frauds

Early in her career, Beth Henley won a Pulitzer Prize for her play about three Southern sisters suffering from various forms of strangeness (“Crimes of the Heart”).

Now, after a lengthy incubation period, she turns her attention to three brothers who are similarly afflicted.

With “Ridiculous Fraud,” Henley’s latest venture to mount the stage of South Coast Repertory — after “Abundance” and “The Debutante Ball” — the playwright again delves into familiar territory: Southern strangeness. Her characters strive, but rarely succeed, and even those who do achieve their minor goals are far from contented.

In the theater’s elaborately outlandish production, beautifully directed by Sharon Ott, the scene is pre-Katrina New Orleans and the focus is on the trio of Clay siblings — a childish runaway groom, a loquacious politician and a moody outdoorsman.

For them, life’s bar is not set extraordinarily high. Even the politician, who’s sleeping with his wife and her mother when not composing grandiose speeches, is only running for county auditor. The other characters in their orbit are equally ambition challenged.

Henley — who gives her characters first names like Lafcad, Kap and Baites — reportedly spent several years weaving this tangled web of intramural eccentricity. Yet it all congeals with the logic of a typical Henley exercise, this one resembling a convention of losers.

The play opens with Lafcad Clay (Ian Fraser) hiding in mortification after walking out on his fiancee the night before the wedding, but that’s hardly the focus of the piece. In fact, it’s rarely brought up after the first scene.

The spotlight soon falls upon brother, Andrew (Matt McGrath), the play’s lone achiever and the aforementioned womanizer.

Sibling rivalry simmers between Andrew and duck hunter Kap (Matt Letscher), and boils over into a startlingly realistic fistfight in the second act (superbly choreographed by Martin Noyes).

Meanwhile, the older folks are acting even more childish, as one (Randy Oglesby) brings home a one-legged young blond (Eliza Pryor) he picked up at the bus station and the cuckolded one (Paul Vincent O’Connor) seeks satisfaction at the point of a knife.

The ladies, unlike most Henley femmes, aren’t that paramount to the plot, but they do have their moments. Betsy Brandt simmers as McGrath’s uncomfortably pregnant spouse, while South Coast Repertory veteran Nike Doukas sizzles as O’Connor’s coolly patrician wife and McGrath’s lover — who’s also dying of cancer.

McGrath and Letscher are first among equals in this strong ensemble, turning in the most dynamic performances — particularly in their confrontation scene, while Brandt impales the heart and Pryor’s kooky character steals the show in the final scene as a “silver angel mime” at the cemetery.

Doukas’ deft underplaying and Fraser’s childish rants also leave their marks.

Set designer Hugh Landwehr has created four imposing scenic backdrops for each of the play’s seasonal segments. Joyce Kim Lee’s costumes (especially Pryor’s in the final scene) are impressive, as is Peter Maradudin’s lighting effects. And Noyes’ fight choreography, as noted, is terrific.

“Ridiculous Fraud” is definitely ridiculous, but hardly fraudulent to its audiences, as it dissects a rather pathetic Southern family and mines its subjects for both chuckles and belly laughs in the heart of Henley country.

Fans of TV’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” who’ve already seen South Coast Repertory’s “Ridiculous Fraud” probably did a double take Monday night when Randy Oglesby, who appears as Uncle Baites in the Henley play, turned up as the uptight father of a “Studio 60” cast member. Can’t get away from this busy actor.