Playwright Charles L. Mee has been into love for a while now. Not that this is a bad thing. In his bevy of plays ruminating on relationships through the ages and the nature of love—First Love, True Love, Big Love—as well as his more recent Wintertime, this prolific and lauded playwright isn't afraid to explore love's ins and outs, and ups and downs. With varying degrees of success, his works shimmer with a messy, unexpected coupling of intense philosophical ruminations and ridiculous acts of physical abandon.
Directed by Michael Michetti, Summertime is set in the lovely, weathered, and in this case most surreal world of Martha's Vineyard, at the summer home of the lovely, fresh as a daisy Tessa (Tessa Thompson, beautifully cast) and her most worldly extended family. Not that plot, per se, is of major concern in Chuck Mee land, but the picture-perfect Tessa seems to be enjoying a relaxed summer morning when she is interrupted by an immediately smitten James (the puppy-like Thomas Patrick Kelly), looking to hire her as an Italian translator. He is soon pushed to the side by the arrival of the seductive older Francois (Bjørn Johnson, eating his fabulous role up). Francois is the lover of Tessa's Italian mother (Elizabeth Huffman, doing Sophia Loren proud), but his dalliances have left trails of broken hearts, including the amazingly adaptive artist Mimi (a sensual Eileen T'Kaye), which causes a few tears until the arrival of Tessa's father (Travis Michael Holder, solid and endearing) and his lover (played with gleeful scientific detachment by Larry Reinhardt-Meyer).
Farce, you say? Way too neat and clean and easy. We haven't yet figured in Mimi's thrill-seeking abandoned lover (the amazing Jeanne Sakata), the household's balls-out maid (Sandy Martin, in a tour de force), cozy lesbian neighbors (Marcia deRousse and Zoe Cotton), and an infantile stranger (a delightful Jim Anzide). Oh, and the introspectively violent pizza delivery guy (Patrick Gallo).
Michetti and his capable cast clearly have a lot of fun here, and the entire design team works wonders: Tom Buderwitz's gorgeous setting is magical, as is Steven Young's lighting, and sound designer John Zalewski does fantastic work, helping with the tone of this often difficult material. Difficult, because the breezy Summertime seems to have a hard time maintaining its larger-than-life size and scope. But I think playwright Mee knew that; he subsequently worked out the kinks when he revisited the play in his more satisfying Wintertime. In the heat of summer, Mee's cinematic characters and out-of-this-world situations—aren't relationships always that way?—hit home in isolated rants and spotlights of grand theatricality (thank you, choreographer Kitty McNamee), but there are many moments of realistic rhetoric in which the landscape of love—and all its pretentiousness–is neither here nor there.
"Summertime," presented by and at the Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena. Thu.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. June 5-July 11. $25-30. (626) 683-6883.