Love, hunger served in complicated ‘Plan’

SAN DIEGO -- Sickeningly rich food serves as a central metaphor for “The American Plan,” Richard Greenberg’s somber 1990 comedy about American outsiders incapable of filling themselves up in a culture of ravenous appetites.

Set in the Catskills in 1960, the play -- which is receiving its West Coast premiere at the Old Globe in a production that can’t quite make sense of all the convoluted action -- features much conversation about the grotesquely elaborate buffets around which guests organize their days. Eva (Sandra Shipley), a wealthy German-Jew emigre who owns an estate opposite one of the busier hotels, looks down her nose at the gluttonous company she’s occasionally forced to keep.

In an escalating verbal aria that’s classic Greenberg, Eva -- described by her daughter, Lili (Kate Arrington), as a “looming, late-Ibsenesque figure” with mah-jongg tiles -- expatiates on the unfortunate sight of her friend Libby Kahkstein gorging herself at dinner. The litany of this voracious woman’s crimes include packing five pats of butter into her baked potato, piling up infinite numbers of buttered rolls and “using every ounce of energy available to her simply to transport her laden bulk” to the dessert table.

No wonder Lili, a bright yet psychologically scarred young woman, refuses the breakfast that her mother’s African American maid and confidant, Olivia (Sharon Hope), has prepared for her. Lili has her eye instead on another tasty treat -- Nick Lockridge (Patrick Zeller), a dreamy magazine writer who has turned up on her lakefront property in his bathing trunks and ignited her romantic fantasies of escape.

A Connecticut WASP who acts as though he’s slipped out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, Nick is treated as an anomaly in the largely Jewish Catskills. He’s the guest of his girlfriend’s father -- a man (Libby’s husband, as it happens) who supposedly “pioneered broadloom in central New Jersey.”

Nick admits that he’s had enough of the resort’s calorically explosive “American plan” -- “the breakfasts and the lunches and the dinners and the coffees and the teas and the snacks and the hardly any exercise in between.” And because neither he nor Lili feels at home in these surroundings (or anywhere, for that matter), their love flowers faster than it otherwise might.

Lili’s biggest concern is her mother. Eva is a notorious meddler who, under the guise of looking after her unbalanced daughter, is determined to control her. Above all, she doesn’t want Lili to fall victim to the predatory types she believes brought her inventor husband to an early death.

The literary influences peering through Greenberg’s play are many, but the triangle -- which later becomes a square when the mysterious and dashing Gil Harbison (Michael Kirby) enters the picture to sexually confuse the situation -- is especially redolent of Henry James. Ethnic comedy wasn’t exactly James’ specialty, but he was a master at creating characters who are as confounded by their own ambivalent minds as they are by the fuzzy motivations and morals of those around them.

Love and money are as intertwined in “The American Plan” as they are in “Washington Square.” Nothing is black and white -- though green, naturally, is the color of all transactions.

Nick may be a masquerading phony, but he’s not simply a fraud. Eva, who escaped Hitler with her husband on the “last boat out,” is a monster with a sorry history. She’s also more “intellectually robust” (to borrow one of her prized distinctions) than her daughter, whose vulnerability is compounded by her inability to outmatch her mother in a game of intrigue that, truth be told, is overloaded and not always convincing.

Greenberg seems afflicted here with restless plot syndrome. The preliminary conflicts he sets up would have satisfied most playwrights, but he piles more and more on his characters’ plates, like Libby Kahkstein at her nightly buffet.

The actors, under the direction of Kim Rubinstein, have only mixed success in coping with the rapidly shifting ground of their story. Zeller does a reasonably good job of revealing Nick’s double-sided nature. We may never crack his blank mystery, but we understand the genuineness of his seductive appeal.

As Lili, Arrington whines more than is necessary, but you can see how her wounded eccentricity could captivate a guy who prides himself on making women happy. What’s less clear is why her mother wants her to be utterly dependent. Lili is the kind of high-strung daughter you’d bribe every matchmaker in the Catskills to find a husband to unload her on.

A side note: Arrington is pregnant. Baggy outfits keep this from becoming too obvious (Emily Pepper’s costumes, incidentally, are splendid all around), but it can be distracting when she flings herself after Nick, sometimes falling hard on the grass of Wilson Chin’s elegant backyard set.

Shipley sharply delivers Eva’s categorical pronouncements. This is a woman who doesn’t just offer opinions -- she airdrops edicts. If she can’t help coming off like a soap opera villain, at least she boldly spices the comedy with Old World pungency.

Hope lends Olivia a quiet dignity, though the character is as underdeveloped as Gil, the other attractive male who turns up uninvited at Eva and Lili’s summer home. Kirby’s jittery performance makes it hard to trust the bombshell he drops about Nick’s past.

What’s Greenberg driving at with all this meshugas? “Happiness exists,” Lili observes. “But it’s for other people.”

It’s a neat way of summarizing this overly manipulative tale.

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

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‘The American Plan’

Where: Cassius Carter Centre Stage, the Old Globe, Balboa Park, San Diego

When: 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 30

Price: $42 to $59

Contact: (619) 23-GLOBE

Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes