IN many ways, Neil LaBute’s “Some Girl(s),” which last night opened at the Lucille Lortel, must have written itself(selves).
The most original thing about it is its title(s), as silly or pretentious as that is.
The smartest commercial thing about it is its casting, which includes the very personable Eric McCormack, just sprung from “Will & Grace,” and a backup bench of other TV names: Fran “The Nanny” Drescher, Judy “Scrubs” Reyes, Brooke “Grey’s Anatomy” Smith and Maura “E.R.” Tierney.
It’s no accident it’s being produced by the admirable MCC Theatre, whose co-artistic director, alongside Robert LuPone, is Bernard Telsey, the New York casting king.
Unfortunately, “Some Girl(s)” is one of those plays that puts a concept where its story ought to be.
McCormack plays Guy, a straight Lothario on the brink of matrimony. A well-traveled man of parts, a sometime minor academic, Guy has, by cannibalizing his life and more particularly his loves, evolved into a short-story writer published by The New Yorker, no less.
Saying goodbye to his madcap days of bachelordom, Guy is now on a four-city tour offering a hail and farewell to all (or some) of the girls he has loved, rather in the nostalgic fashion of Julio Iglesias but in a far meaner spirit.
That’s the concept. Add dialogue, and you might have a very minor Neil Simon-style boulevard comedy.
The trouble is, Neil LaBute is no Neil Simon, and his play lies on the stage floor as flat as a pancake.
Very few laughs are provided by the pedestrian script – indeed, the only big guffaw is reserved for the stage crew when they’re first seen dressed as hotel employees rearranging the furniture for the scene change in Neil Patel’s versatile set.
Neither director Jo Bonney nor the cast can get the thing off the ground, not even at the end, when LaBute finally exhibits a touch of his much-fabled misanthropy.
The cast works hard. McCormack as LaBute’s single-minded, self-absorbed egoist of an anti-hero does well enough but hardly ignites the theater with the natural charisma of a star.
The four ladies he’s loved and ditched vary from the rather awful, stilted Drescher as a married lady he abandoned after being discovered in flagrant circumstances by her husband, to the excellent, cheerfully spunky Tierney as a young woman prepared to give as much she takes. The competent Smith and the mannered Reyes fall somewhere in between.
But “Some Girl(s)” is no more to be recommended for anyone wanting to move from the two-dimensional world of television to the three-dimensional magic of the live theater than it is to an audience paying $65 (or $70 on weekends) for the privilege of watching them.
It’s a total waste of an evening.
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SOME GIRL(S)
Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St., at Hudson Street; (212) 279-4200.