Comedy Reaches Its 'Comic Potential'

It’s an Alan Ayckbourn summer in Pittsburgh—“House” and “Garden” are running concurrently at the Stephen Foster Memorial in Oakland, and now “Comic Potential” is at the Little Lake Theatre running through July 23.

The playwright must be rolling in residuals just from Pennsylvania alone.

“Comic Potential” is a metatextual treatise on artificial intelligence, told with impeccable comedic timing.

In the near future, actors have been replaced with realistic simulacrums or Actoids (Actor Androids). Considering the computer-generated actors in George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson films, it’s not really that far-fetched.

JC 31-333 or Jacie Triplethree (deftly played by Kate Neubert-Lechner) is developing self-awareness. She is either longing to break free of the monosyllabic nurse she plays in a trite, long-running soap opera and do comedy, or there is a massive glitch in her system. Either way she’s a sucker for a classic double take, a pie in the face and the pratfall.

Adam Trainsmith (a superb Jason Dille), a young up-and-coming comedy writer, sees Jacie as his mechanical muse. Adam builds a better mousetrap, constructing a clever post-modern Pygmalion to be produced at the same television studio. He even makes use of the sudser’s director, Chandler Tate (Dale Irvin), and the android technicians, Prim (Jena Oberg) and Trudi (Augustina Filippini) much to the chagrin of Carla Pepperbloom (Lisa Hoffmann).

Pepperbloom, a regional manager for Adam’s mirthless martinet of an uncle, Lester Trainsmith (Bill Bennett), seeks to quash the comedy writer’s dreams and wipe JC 31-333’s memory banks clean, just as Jacie realizes she is more than her programming.

There is a lot of prerequisite exposition in the first act, but it’s crackling with crisp dialogue and clever observations about humanity, film and television.   

It’s not until the second act that “Comic Potential” fulfills its, well, comic potential. There is a restaurant scene that is flat out fall-on-the-floor funny. And an audacious dance number that causes fits of laughter in the aisles.  

Neubert-Lechner buries herself in the role of the alacritous android. For a few moments, if you suspend your disbelief, you may forget that she’s a real live girl and not an acting automaton.

Filippini and Oberg are delightful in their performances as the robot handlers. Filippini also shines in two vastly different roles as a spoiled rich girl in a dress shop and a Cockney call girl in the ramshackle Hotel Mombasa, both the prostitute and the hotel are available for hourly rates.

Charles Grant Carey makes mountains out of his molehill roles, munching up scenery with gleeful relish.  His character of Marmion is a surreptitious scene-stealer.  

Dave James, Jennifer Kopach and John McGovern comprise the rest of the cast, displaying admirable acting skills (especially since their really robots).

Ayckbourn’s play may have some already worn android tropes; Jacie, like Hymie the robot (played by Dick Gautier on the television series “Get Smart”), is also stymied by allegories and aphorisms, and many of the jokes were mined by Vicki in the 80s sitcom "Small Wonder." Still, "Comic Potential" is a delightful romp of a romantic comedy, with a Sci-Fi twist.

Sunny Disney Fitchett directs a tight production, with computerized precision (she may also secretly be a robot).

Ayckbourn certainly showed chutzpah naming his show “Comic Potential,” but it is the humans (and who or whatever else) in this production who achieve a marvelous level of comic potential.  

“Comic Potential” runs July 14-17 and 21-23.