Playwright Fails to Come Up With a Proper ‘Analogy’

ANAHEIM —  Playwright Tony Kushner, famous for “Angels in America,” began a story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “We are in Hell--have you noticed?--which resembles a dinner theater in Orange County, Calif.”

I have no idea which dinner theater he meant. I doubt he meant any one in particular. But I have news for him. Last weekend, hell was a place called Stages (not a dinner theater), where William Mittler’s “Analogy Hill” had its premiere.

The play, said by the theater company to mark Mittler’s 19th writing credit, has about as much grace and opacity as its title. But worse, it has a cloying atmosphere of square, domestic sentimentality that’s all the more striking because of the offbeat industrial-park setting of Stages itself and a seemingly hip audience made up largely of college-age playgoers.

The story, such as it is, starts out in a kindergarten class and takes the four main characters from childhood to adulthood through various decades and romantic complications. That the four eventually grow up must be taken on faith. There is little or no evidence of it onstage, either in the acting or the writing.

“Analogy Hill”--the play’s unhelpful title is taken from one of several neighborhood hills mentioned by the characters--is staged on a series of platforms and ramps intended to evoke a sloping hillside. The playing space suggests, instead, several floating islands hanging in the air.

There is a feeble attempt to wring cosmic significance from the banal details of a forgettable story about who loves whom through the use of generic figures in black, who come and go and sometimes take over the action proper. (So little drama occurs from moment to moment, in fact, that it’s misleading even to describe it as action.)

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Given the script’s general lack of coherence, “Analogy Hill” is at best a work in progress. To call it that, however, presumes that somewhere, somehow, the playwright might actually be able to shape the material into a finished piece of work. But that seems impossible.

Judging from the production, I would say Mittler and Gwaltney would do better to scrap the whole thing. There is nothing to be salvaged from this outing except the recognition that “Analogy Hill” is the sort of juvenilia worth leaving in a bottom drawer.

* “Analogy Hill,” Stages Theater, 1188 Fountain Way, Anaheim. Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m. Ends Sunday. $8. (714) 630-3059. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

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“Analogy Hill”

Alyssa Canann: Bethe

Patti Cumby: Anne

Kreg Donahoe: Man

Jillary Gordon: Woman

Kirk Huff: Man

K.C. Mercer: Joey

Kevin Moynahan: Bobby

A Stages Entertainment Group production of a play by William Mittler. Directed by Patrick Gwaltney.