Looks delicious but it’s empty calories

Technicians huddle around a tabletop display that stands in a cluster of lights, in line with a camera. The crew’s single yet enormously complicated task is to choreograph the flow of a fruit smoothie drink so that, as the Pepto-Bismol-colored goop twists through the air into a waiting cup, it somehow looks appetizing.

“Tabletop” takes the audience inside the business of tabletop filming, which provides those product shots that, when flashed during a commercial, instill instant desire. Playwright Rob Ackerman uses this as the setting for a workplace soap opera that is also a comic fable about capitalism. Having emerged from New York’s fringe theater scene, the play arrives on the West Coast in a Laguna Playhouse production that is a marvel of precision yet ultimately fails to satisfy.

“In my opinion, a commercial -- a 30-second spot on TV -- is the single most eloquent statement of our time,” Ron (Al Espinosa), an excitable young gofer on the set, declares early in the story. He yearns to create art in a world of cruel practicalities -- where a few seconds of film stock can cost hundreds of dollars, where dropping and bruising an apple from the commercial’s fruit display could threaten a career, where the words “it’s too mid-’90s” and “he could drop right off the A-list” are the kiss of death.

The shoot hasn’t been going well for the team at work in this Manhattan studio, depicted in painstaking detail -- right down to the soda and snack machines that lurk just beyond the airy, equipment-filled work area -- by set designer Dwight Richard Odle and expertly lighted by Paulie Jenkins. Marcus (Jeff Meek), the volatile director, is on the verge of becoming passe, and if he loses assignments, so does his team. Expletives keep exploding from his mouth, unsettling everyone else.

Peripheral action telegraphs larger issues, such as the career roadblocks placed in the way of workers because of their race, gender or sexuality. Meanwhile, the script agitates for respectful treatment of laborers and due credit for jobs well done, all while analyzing the impact of advertising, from Ron’s lofty ideals to the sniping assertion by prop master Jeffrey (Sal Viscuso) that it destroys “the last dregs of independent thinking.” Director Andrew Barnicle and his actors -- who also include Tony Jones, Andrea Odinov and Kevin Symons -- deftly build momentum as the action, presented without intermission, snowballs.

But in piling on social philosophy, Ackerman overloads his otherwise slight story, and as he goes for the big finish, he causes characters to violate their established codes of behavior. The script overheats and melts down -- much as the frosted fruit drink keeps threatening to do under the lights’ white-hot glare.

*

‘Tabletop’

Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach

When: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m., except 2 p.m. only June 27

Ends: June 27

Price: $45 to $52

Contact: (949) 497-2787 or www.LagunaPlayhouse.com

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes