STAGE REVIEWS : ‘SAME TIME, NEXT YEAR’

If you’re going to do “Same Time, Next Year” successfully, you’d better make sure the actors playing Doris and George are more than accomplished. They’ve got to be likable as well.

As the only characters in this Bernard Slade comedy, they must sustain our interest for more than two hours as they age through 25 years of love, lust and life’s labors. If the performances are flat, the play can be an exercise in tedium.

Fortunately, Veda Franklin and Gary Weissbrot are rather companionable in the Resident Theatre Company production at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center. Weissbrot stumbles early on by making George too much of a whiner, but he is less insipid by the second act. And Franklin is inviting from the first moments when she slips from their one-night-stand bed and announces that she doesn’t do this type of thing very often. After all, Doris tells him, she is contemplating a life as a nun.

As “Same Time, Next Year” follows the couple through their annual trysts at the same hillside inn over nearly three decades, both Doris and George are expected to be reflections of a changing society. Through them, the audience is asked to remember an America that passed from the Eisenhower era into the activist ‘60s only to find itself with Nixon in the White House. Theirs is a generation in flux, and Franklin and Weissbrot, by shifting their attitudes to reflect the prevailing Zeitgeist, are able to communicate something of the times.

But they are better at showing how love based on friendship can keep people interested in each other over the years. This peculiar once-a-year liaison stretches the limits of believability, but the acting and Sydell Weiner’s level-headed, straightforward direction make it seems plausible enough.

There are some nice details here, including Lynda Krinke’s costumes, which range from George’s Republican suits to Doris’ hippie peasant dress. And Gil Morales’ set is a fine joining of utility and craftsmanship. He makes the inn a sylvan retreat by using the Muckenthaler’s trees for background and filling the lovers’ room with piney angles and rock-covered walls.