This ‘Room’ should have a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign

By Joe Brown (contact)

Thursday, June 26, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Harrah’s headliner Rita Rudner and her husband, Martin Bergman, have written a play. And it’s having its world premiere at the nonprofessional Las Vegas Little Theatre. A wisp of a sitcom, “Room 776” is not nearly ready for prime time. Or Sunday matinees.

The writing, directing and performances are unbelievable — and I mean that in the dictionary sense of the word. As in “not able to be believed.” (By that measure, you could call this play “incredible,” and even “terrific.”)

It doesn’t seem right to lure unsuspecting audiences — and make them pay $22 — to sit through a workshop staging of such an unbaked piece of work.

Rudner and Bergman have swiped a setup straight from the ’70s rom-com series “Love American Style”: A prissy, newly separated Midwesterner — a stand-in for Rudner — arrives for a Vegas getaway with her suitcase and 10 rolls of quarters. A Kevin James-type schlub also shows up for the World Series of Poker. Turns out they’re booked into the same room in an overbooked hotel. Ba-dum-bum.

Wendy (played by Nancy Denton) is the kind of gal who researched her Vegas trip on the Travel Channel. She plays the slots, shops and speaks in Rudnerisms: “Why is poker all over my television? ... And when do you flush?” (It’s hard not to replay her lines in Rudner’s prim voice and clipped stand-up cadences.) Tom (Scott Ast, who gives it his best shot as a sad sack schmo) is saddled with too many windy speeches about the significance of poker.

Those lines are probably the contribution of director Bergman, who stages “Room 776” as a classic farce, with lots of opening and closing doors, and a series of short scenes separated by blackouts. It might have played better with a laugh track.

At the Sunday performance I saw, a good number of the laughs came when the audience merely recognized names, brands and situations: Tipping is a necessary evil, hotels will make you wait on hold, room service meals will arrive late and cold. When Nancy first unpacked her suitcase and the audience saw the layers of tissue separating her neatly folded clothing, there was much excited murmuring among the mostly elderly theatergoers.

By the way, if you miss a punch line, don’t worry. Someone sitting near you is bound to repeat it out loud to a seatmate.

Rudner and Bergman attempt to make the shticky script more substantial by dropping dollops of tragedy into the characters’ back stories. But delivered by cartoon characters in the context of this contrived fluff, the intrusions of real life are just jarring.

All of the performers deliver their lines in a panicky rush — since the play runs just over an hour, no one in the audience would begrudge them the extra second here and there to pause or breathe or deliver a joke as it was written.

Todd Simonds and Brian Scott get laughs for their campy cameos as a room service waiter and a hotel manager. As hotel maid Sheree, an actress named Goddess Lisa Illia earned (apparently) unintentional laughs when her turndown service left the room looking more rumpled than when she entered.

Apart from a few zippy lines, the cleverest elements of “Room 776” are the title and Ron Lindblom’s hotel room set, with wings that revolve to reveal restaurant and casino settings. It’s more substantial than the flimsy material deserves.