Clever Little Lies

Playwright Joe DiPietro is a man of the modern-day drawing room comedy. Last season, he gave Broadway his operatic farce Living on Love, featuring world-renowned soprano Renée Fleming and Douglas Sills as musical superstars whose clownish antics rejuvenate their fizzling marriage. Clever Little Lies — now at the Westside Theatre after a 2013 George Street Playhouse world premiere — brings a comic eye to another middle-aged couple's well-furnished living room (and we have the good fortune for that couple to be played by the equally electric comedians Marlo Thomas and Greg Mullavey).

This time, however, DiPietro gives us some marital cynicism where deal-breaking deceptions are simply the fictions we tell ourselves (and our spouses) to get us from one day to the next. It's a thoroughly depressing view of matrimony made digestible through bubbly dialogue, well-paced punch lines, and a lighthearted air that proved the magic formula for DiPietro's smash-hit relationship-centric musical I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. But for a play that makes bigger leaps into the real, unsettling waters of lies and betrayal, a little nausea wouldn't be a bad thing.

Mullavey's character, Bill Sr., has certainly accepted indigestion as a way of life. After a locker room confession from his son Billy (George Merrick) — a married man and new father — about his affair with a 23-year-old athletic trainer, it becomes abundantly clear that Bill himself has choked down some improper urges over the years. But "find the happy" in life's mediocrity has become his modus operandi and is now the advice he gives his son, whose passionate love affair is making him rethink all of his choices. The Bills part ways agreeing to continue their man-to-man talk later and with the strict understanding that the family matriarch Alice can be privy to none of this sensitive information.

But of course, secrets are no match for womanly wiles. The intractable Alice, played convincingly by Marlo Thomas, can smell something fishy even as she rants about the death of literature and the tragic commercialization of the bookstore she owns and operates. In the way of maternal superpowers, she can sense her boy is in trouble simply from Bill's abnormal acquiescence to her ramblings. She has no choice but to fix whatever's wrong, so she lures Billy, his wife, Jane (Kate Wetherhead), and their new baby, Emily, over to the house for an interrogation and a slice of cheesecake. Unfortunately, Billy's mistress has not been notified of the schedule change and keeps calling in the middle of this family get-together.

The scenario is rife with theatrical potential — both dramatic and comedic — but neither DiPietro's dialogue nor David Saint's direction lend the play any distinct theatricality. The stage seems to be more of a hurdle than a comfortable home for the play, whose evenly spaced quips and literal environment seem better suited for a sitcom than a staged production — Wetherhead and Merrick even share an entire scene from the inside of a car while projections of traffic zoom by behind them. Scenic designer Yoshi Tanokura does, however, build a beautiful living space (complete with plush furniture, an espresso machine, and a perfect collection of framed family photos on the walls) for our characters to have their climactic confrontations and for the talented quartet of actors to take the reins.

All it takes is a few rounds of cocktails for both the jokes and the performances to pick up steam. Thomas, who owns any room she steps in, presides over the domestic domain, while Mullavey, the family's down-trodden patriarch, spits out hilarious one-liners from his designated lounge chair like bullets of frantic energy. He portends an ominous future for poor Jane — the next generation's peacemaker — whom Wetherhead imbues with a mild shrillness, couched in an endearing sweetness. You can't help but pity the poor woman as she grasps at straws to please her adulterous husband, played by Merrick with a combination of insolence and desperation.

Perfectly coiffed and mildly intoxicated, Alice, Jane, Bill, and Bill Jr., are as American as apple pie as they silently suffer in their stifling suburban confines. They all try not to rock any boats, and yet, a torpedo still finds its way into the conversation as a fresh secret is introduced to the floor. Even so, the sense underlying the play is a world of sitcom where punch lines are a beat away and stakes don't truly exist. That may be the world DiPietro's characters would like to believe they live in, but we should be able to decipher the truth from just another clever little lie.