Howevermuch the ancient Israelites would have loved to sprint across the desert towards the promised land, fate decreed that they spend forty years slogging across the sand, turning a joyous deliverance from Egypt into a tedious shlep. To some extent, the same thing happens to Larry Coen and David Crane's zany comedy, Epic Proportions, which has the campiness and punchlines to be a romp but succumbs to inconsistency and clumpy pacing. Director Jerry Zaks has been in a slump lately, with the Nathan Lane revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum his last bona fide hit. (Even that show -- before Whoopi Goldberg singlehandedly rejuvenated it -- felt forced and overexerted, the actors working so hard to show us how hard they were working.)
With Epic Proportions, about life behind the scenes at the filming of a 1930s biblical movie extravaganza, Zaks employs a get-`em-on, get-`em-off approach, relying on the actors' instincts for hamming it up to get them through the draggy spots. The clunkiness is a shame, because Coen and Crane's script has much funny stuff in it, and Kristin Chenoweth is a joy as the movie's production manager-turned-star. She has exacting control of every centimeter of her face and an understanding of how even the most minute change in expression can work miracles on an audience's funny bone. Not only that, she's often matched grimace-for-grimace by Ruth Williamson, as a grandiose ancient Queen (and, when the cameras aren't rolling, middle-aged diva). As she did when training in the Busches (plays by Charles, that is), Williamson makes her every entrance an entrance, and the effort, however forced, is appreciated. But even these titans can't bring Epic Proportions above a simmer.
A major problem is character inconsistency. Chenoweth's Louise spends the first half of the play as a kewpie-pie martinet, ordering 3,400 movie extras to and fro with know-it-all precision. Yet when she's given the opportunity to take over as director, she frets, doubts herself and blithely hands the job to her boyfriend, Phil (Phil Bennet), who only days earlier had been a lowly extra. As for Phil, he seems like a nice enough guy in the first hour (after all, he treks all the way to the desert to bring his star-struck brother home), yet later when he turns into a selfish oaf, the brother avows that Phil has been a jerk all his life. This kind of whatever-works-for-the-moment playwriting cuts us off from the characters and makes the play only as good as its last punch line. As his recent plays have proved, even Paul Rudnick isn't good enough to sustain that pace for a full evening. Also, Coen & Crane's play never fully recovers from a dumb, "Wizard of Oz"-style scene in which the protagonists meet the film's reclusive director, D.W. DeWitt (a juiceless Richard B. Shull).
Through it all, Chenoweth's a treasure, but too many flaws deflate Epic Proportions into a modest proposition.
