Theatre in Review: Clever Little Lies (Westside Theatre/Upstairs)Can't somebody put together a committee to find a good vehicle for Marlo Thomas? I'd volunteer to take part. Even in Clever Little Lies, which resembles something hidden far back in one of Neil Simon's desk drawers, she is capable of working minor wonders. Given a monologue about the fallen state of modern bookstores -- she plays, Alice, a suburban bookseller -- she turns a not very bright series of comments about Charles Dickens coffee mugs and the sequel to an erotic potboiler titled Sixty Shades of Gray into something genuinely agreeable. Assembling her family -- husband, son, and daughter-in-law -- to sleuth out some family secrets, she earns real laughs with some surprisingly limp lines. For example: Surveying her rather well-toned offspring, she snarls, "There's no reason for a straight married man to be in that good a physical condition." Having lured everyone with the promise of a divine cheesecake, she turns it down, muttering, "Oh no, I'm saving all my calories for alcohol." Reminiscing about an old lover who slipped from her grasp, she notes that those were the days before cell phones, so they were cut off. "Wait," says the daughter-in-law, "Didn't they have landlines?" "We didn't call them landlines, dear. We called them phones," she snaps, furious that her romantic reverie has been spoiled by niggling details. You wouldn't think that any of these was worth the time of day, but Thomas, speaking in that distinctive purr -- all steel, sheathed in velvet -- and armed with crack timing, knows exactly what she's doing. But she's doing it in Clever Little Lies, which wants to be a throwback to the good old days of domestic comedies when it should be a throwback to the old days of good domestic comedies. Bill, Alice's husband, discovers that their son, Billy, is cheating on his wife, Jane, who just delivered their first baby and is feeling more maternal than sexy. Billy, who has fallen for Jasmine, a trainer at his gym, swears Bill to an oath of silence, but the minute Bill gets home Alice smells a rat and decides to convene her loved ones for a little inquisition. The play breaks down into three sections. The first, in which we learn of Billy's affair, his blah marriage, and Alice's initial sleuthing, is filled with the sort of jokes for jokes' sake that can't stand on their own and do little to make us care about the characters. Billy and Bill are in the locker room after a tennis match. Billy, dressing for work, realizes that he doesn't have a pair of socks. Bill offers his own, saying he can do without them because "I've got loafers, everyone will think I'm hip!" When Billy confesses that his inamorata is only twenty-three, Bill snaps, "Twenty-three isn't a person yet!" Later, Alice notes that the end of romance in a marriage comes when husbands stop picking up their wives at the airport. Jane notes that Billy didn't pick her up after her last trip. "I sent a car service," he protests. "A car service is just a cab with a driver who can speak English," Alice remarks. The second section -- and by far the best -- comes when Alice decides it's time to bare her romantic past, leading to an embarrassing string of revelations that leaves the others dumbfounded. It isn't brilliant but it is at least a real situation with an undertone of comic truth, and Thomas is at her best here. This, sadly, leads to the final scene, when the playwright, Joe DiPietro, suddenly decides -- far too late -- to inject an authentic note of heartbreak into the proceedings. It is so ill-prepared for that it makes you want to get back to those cheesecake and scotch gags. Anyway, under David Saint's fast-paced direction, Greg Mullavey works his full repertory of shocked and appalled faces as Bill, who discovers that he doesn't really know his loved ones at all. George Merrick lends all of his considerable geniality to the role of Billy, but the character, as written, is such a selfish doofus that it is difficult to care whether his marriage survives or not. Kate Wetherhead, an accomplished comic actress and writer, is forced to play straight as Jane, the dullest of the four roles. That the long scene between Jane and Billy in the car, on the way to Alice and Bill's house, is so tedious is more a commentary on the dialogue than on the actors who are made to say it. In other respects, the production has the kind of polish that one associates with the heyday of boulevard comedy. Yoshi Tanokura's locker room and suburban living room sets are both attractive and highly functional. The designer -- I think, as no projection designer is credited -- provides many attractive views of New York City and the suburbs. The one miscalculation is the scene in the car with Billy and Jane: They sit in what looks like a renovated bumper car, with the set covered with images of passing highways; the result is overbearing and a little vertiginous; it would be better to let the actors simply play their scene without such unnecessary visual distraction. Esther Arroyo's costumes, Christopher J. Bailey's lighting, and Scott Killian's sound design and original music are all perfectly solid. But it's all in the service of a distinctly rickety vehicle, a labored family-trauma piece that consistently settles for the laziest, easiest jokes until it takes on a totally unearned seriousness. DiPietro's play is filled with lies, but very, very few of them are clever. -- David Barbour 
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