Actors, Not Plot, Pull ‘Corner’ Together

J.B. Priestley’s 1932 “Dangerous Corner” is the kind of play in which every character has a shocking secret, or seven--even the dead ones. In fact, the six key players confess to so many moral crimes and hidden passions that the play starts to sound like one of those “Carol Burnett Show” parodies. This is a household in which the phrase, “But why--why--in God’s name, how could you?,” is much more likely to be asked than “How are you?”

Director Andrew J. Robinson does not try to pretend that this isn’t funny. Staging the play at the Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood, he has his actors play two realities--the Carol Burnett reality and the straight-faced Priestley reality. The actors balance the two realities so well that this old chestnut is surprisingly entertaining. The fact that it’s short doesn’t hurt.

As usual with his work at the Matrix, Robinson has assembled a fine cast. The one I saw alternates with a second cast, as is the theater’s custom.

In 1992, the Royal National Theatre in Britain rescued Priestley from irrelevancy with a powerful production of his 1946 “An Inspector Calls,” which was seen at the Ahmanson in 1996. That production featured a fantastic, collapsible mansion that embodied the play’s subject--the ties between material solvency and moral decay. “Dangerous Corner” is an earlier and less interesting treatise on the same themes. In a clumsier fashion, it, too, shows how sinister secrets are a heartbeat away from ruining comfortable upper-middle-class lives.

The setting is the home of Robert Chatfield (David Dukes, also played by Granville Van Dusen), the director of a publishing house and his society wife, Freda (Claudette Nevins, also Susan Sullivan). Their small party includes Freda’s younger brother Gordon (Jay Karnes, also Raphael Sbarge), who also works in the firm, as does the bachelor Charles Stanton (Gregory Itzin, also Lawrence Pressman). Also present is the firm’s secretary Olwen (Lynnda Ferguson, also Marilyn McIntyre); Gordon’s high-strung young wife, Betty (Julia Campbell, also Anna Gunn and Rachel Robinson); and a visiting novelist named Maud Mockridge (Claudette Sutherland, also Kitty Swink). Maud likes them all so much she keeps telling them what a great group they are.

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They’re not. The second Maud leaves, they attack her work and her personality. It’s just a matter of time before they do the same to one another. Freda brings out a little cigarette box--a Pandora’s box--that belonged to Martin, her dead brother-in-law. When she opens it, she inadvertently sets off a long and impossibly torturous chain of confessions that tears apart every relationship onstage. The question is not who slept with whom and but who didn’t sleep with whom. Homosexuality, drug abuse and theft are heaped into the mix as well.

Priestley gives a philosophical frame to the melodrama, a “what if” clause that attempts to make us examine whether or not honesty is a vastly overrated quality. As in “An Inspector Calls,” the author plays a trick with time and reality, though it’s a more belabored trick and with less payoff.

More than the plot, you may enjoy the performances. Itzin is engrossing and funny as the cynical publisher with the slicked-back hair, the character most comfortable with admitting hypocrisy. Ferguson shows that the secretary doesn’t really belong to the group; her Olwen exudes a tight moral judgment that she tries to disguise with unconvincing gaiety. Karnes is very good as the young, sneering aristocrat. Dukes has a nice buoyancy as the group’s relatively decent host. Campbell pushes her character’s nervous, spoiled quality. As the novelist, Sutherland looks like a butch Coco Channel and seems to represent some other, more sensible kind of life.

The women’s dresses are amusingly designed by Naomi Yoshida Rodriguez. Robinson is a gifted director who has cleared away cobwebs from this “Dangerous Corner.” It still doesn’t feel dangerous though. Not every Priestley chestnut can be completely resurrected.

* “Dangerous Corner,” Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends July 20. $20. (213) 852-1445. Running time: 1 hours, 40 minutes.