"Crooked Lines" Offers Straight-Up Comedy

John Blenn is at it again.

The East Meadow-raised pop culture journalist cum playwright recently concluded his latest work on the stage, a rollicking send-up of the glam-Hollywood lifestyle, entitled Crooked Lines.

The Middle Class American Productions show, which Blenn wrote, directed and played the lead role in, ran three weeks at the Merrick Theatre and Center for the Arts in Merrick.

Crooked Lines is a genial living-room farce draped on a tale of a cynical and successful Hollywood comic who engages in a midlife reassessment of his life and work when a college chum shows up at his doorstep. Peppered with name-dropping allusions to current pop figures, and with a nod or two to insider New York/Long Island references, the writing is slick, often jewel-like in its comedic bon mot, and just saucy enough for regional audiences without straying too far from family fare.

Blenn is slated to play a featured role in a new James Caan/Wood Harris/Danny DeVito film, Sweetwater, written and to be directed by Hofstra alumni Martin Guigui, this fall. He recently appeared in the upcoming Dennis Quaid thriller, Beneath The Darkness, due in theaters this Halloween. Other appearances include Paul Blart: Mall Cop with Kevin James, Thicker Than Water, Evil Streets and sitcom pilot Reelin’. And he has penned the screenplay to the upcoming National Lampoon Cattle Call II, a sequel to the highly successful 2007 comedy starring Chelsea Handler and Diedrich Bader.

Throughout Crooked Lines, it is the impishly substantial Blenn who wins the day as the Jack Black/John Belushi/John Candy-styled Morgan Riley. He flirts and teases his way confidently through the rest of the characters and his own ample shadow for two acts and a bewildering succession of sports shirt changes -- even though the plot is mainly carried along by Gregg Jacoby, a founding member of Blenn’s troupe and narrative foil as Geoff Spinelli.

It seems that Spinelli is Riley’s college roommate from Syracuse, a straight and sincere sort of fellow who has been dumped by his wife, who's trying to find direction by walking into the middle of the playful debauchery, crass scheming and aimless vamping which is the world of the Hollywood star’s entourage.

Wrong move for Spinelli! There’s a lot of couch jockeying going on, with agents, personal assistants, clinging relatives and latter day wenches orbiting like pellucid electrons around the massive nuclear presence which Morgan Riley represents in all their lives.

What it lacks in character development and plot complexity, Crooked Lines more than makes up for in quickness of dialogue, salacious nastiness, rapid forward movement -- and a playful charm that shines brightly through the play's odd flirtation with the very cynical glam materialism it purports to debunk.

This is the 59th play of Blenn’s to premiere in area theaters, beginning in the early 1990s with the comedy Xs and Os. In writing Crooked Lines, the Five Towns College professor is no doubt drawing from a world he is not entirely unfamiliar with in his play, starting with his DJ work at Hofstra decades ago, and progressing through such rock-star associated journalistic ventures as Long Island Entertainment, Improper Hamptonian, Good Times and The Island Ear.

The writing offers show-stealing moments for several characters, and particularly successful moments are turned in by Scott Interrante (Dr. Bonardi), as psychologist/feng shui advisor; Mike Pope (Horace), the laconic pool guy who plants himself on a couch and makes himself at home; and Lois Thomas (Coco St. Pierre), the edgy and eccentric cook who asserts a strange power over various members of the entourage with her offbeat comments.

But like any good vortex should do -- and like the character he portrays -- it is Blenn who ultimately provides centripetal force to the proceedings.

Next up for Middle Class American Productions and John Blenn? A short piece on May 12-13, Late In Life Job Interview, at the Blue Lagoon Restaurant in West Babylon; and American Dating Catastrophes Vol IX, at the Boulton Center in Bay Shore on July 26-27.

Certainly worth a look-see for anyone interested in checking out the talents of a troupe that offers something rare and worth paying attention to -- an ambitious level of all-original Long Island theater entertainment.