Can't tell the players without a program

Before the curtain even goes up on 'Character Assassins,' a new play by Charlie Schulman receiving its world premiere at New Jersey Repertory Company, the theater company’s (actual, non-actor) producer gives a little promotional spiel -- the fire exits, the cell phones, a strobe light warning.

But it turns out that nothing in ‘Character Assassins,’ including this brief speech, is exactly what it seems.

The play opens as Jonathon, a drunk and disgruntled playwright, breaks into the apartment of the critic who has just savaged his latest theatrical effort. With a gun to his head the critic, Simon, is forced to admit the clichéd conceit: scratch a theater critic and you will find a closeted playwright.

Yes, it turns out that Simon has written a play -- one that he, an eminent critic with infallible taste, has determined to be the perfect two-character play.

And as Jonathon thumbs through the script, commenting on this device or that turn of phrase, the two characters in Simon’s play begin to seem awfully familiar. In fact, Simon’s script begins to resemble rather closely the play that we’re watching. The pair soon hatch a scheme to produce Simon’s play under Jonathon’s byline, so that critics will view the work with eyes unjaundiced by their feelings (affectionate or antipathetic) about Simon.

Very early in the first act, the sanctimonious Simon justifies his cruel review of Jonathon’s earlier play, declaring that “I can’t stand plays about writers.”

Since this two-character set piece is about nothing but writers -- a playwright, desperate for a commercial hit, and a critic who has written a play -- it’s hard, when contemplating a review of this solipsistic, self-referential comedy, not to take the bait.

Brad Frazier manages to make Jonathon’s whiplash-inducing transformation during the story not unbelievable. From pathetic drunk to cunning plagiarist, it’s as if the devious snake that his character has become by the end of the play has completely consumed the pathetic weasel in whose body he was first introduced.

Warren Kelley inhabits the pompous blowhard that is Simon perhaps a tad too effectively, making it very difficult to sympathize with the character, even when it becomes clear that Simon will be hoisted, not with his own petard but with explosives that by all rights should have been meant for Jonathon.

In fact, ‘Character Assassins’ is clever. But not quite as clever as the playwright (the real playwright, Charlie Schulman, that is) would like audiences to believe. Too often, Schulman seems to sacrifice authenticity in the service of cleverness. Jonathon stumbles around the apartment, wobbly and drunk, but still has the wherewithal to trade razor barbs with a critic known for his rapier wit. Both characters deliver asides directly to the audience – but each performs this bit of magic only once. At another point the meticulous, uber-intellectual Simon rushes out of his apartment, the door of which was kicked in at the show’s beginning -- leaving his Manhattan apartment and all of his possessions completely exposed and unguarded.

Jessica Parks’ denatured vision of Simon’s apartment, the play’s single set, resembles nothing so much as a room in a hotel that caters to business travelers. One wonders what, if anything, was being communicated by the odd collection of theatrical posters lining the walls: Doubt; Passing Strange, The Threepenny Opera; Anything Goes, and A Streetcar Named Desire.

It doesn’t do to think too hard about the plot of ‘Character Assassins.’ Like the infamous time travel episodes of Star Trek, the whole thing tends to fold in on itself when examined too closely.

But much of the dialogue is snappy, and the plotting is quick-witted (even if self-consciously so). Schulman and director Dana Benningfield move things along briskly – the whole play, including an intermission, is less than 90 minutes long. What this play lacks in logic, it makes up in brevity.

'Character Assassins' plays at New Jersey Repertory Company, 179 Broadway in Long Branch, through October 31st. For more information, call 732-229-3166 or visit www.njrep.org.