Clichéd ‘What’s Wrong?’ doesn’t feel right

The Donald Margulies comedy “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” is a baffler.

The playwright is a Pulitzer Prize winner for the excellent “Dinner With Friends.” The Spokane Civic Theatre’s cast is talented and funny. The plot – a man’s dead wife shows up and starts rearranging the furniture – has good Neil Simon-like comic potential (or maybe Noel Coward-like potential, since the show is billed as a “Jewish ‘Blithe Spirit’ “).

But the entire show struck me as more than a little bit strange.

For instance, one of the main bits of business revolves around the grieving widower’s attempt to get his teenage son to wear his dead wife’s dress.

The teenage son reluctantly pulls the dress on over his clothes and wears it for the next 10 or so minutes. I suppose this could be funny in the right circumstances, but it wasn’t. Not that it was particularly creepy or anything. It just seemed odd, random and unlike the way any grieving husband would act. And it was especially unlike the way a grieving teenager would act. Even a comedy needs to have some roots in reality.

This play has these kinds of credibility problems throughout. Something is off, either the direction, by Kimberly J. Roberts, or the script. I lean toward the script, because Margulies has made this entire group into a stereotyped family that does nothing but squabble – neurotically and pointlessly – about everything.

There is some good work in the cast. Evelyn Renshaw plays the most alive character of the entire bunch, which is ironic because she plays Shirley, the dead wife. (Yes, Shirley walks and talks and cleans house just as if she were alive.)

Cody Wymore is wisecrackingly effective as the teenage son, Artie, who appears to be callous toward his mother’s death. But we can tell, through Wymore’s body language, that this is just a facade.

Maynard Villers did the best he could with the role of Mort, the husband, who spends the first act being morose and petulant and the second act being needy. Mort’s attempt to get his (dead) wife in the sack was one of the play’s particular low points.

Other characters include the obligatory dirty old man and various other clichés. That’s fitting, because the play is full of clichés about letting go and getting on with one’s life, those being the show’s shopworn themes.

Even the title is a cliché – and not a particularly apt one, since it refers in only a tangential way to anything that happens in the play.

There are some enjoyable moments in the show, mostly revolving around Artie and his teenage smart-aleck remarks. In general, the cast manages to get more laughs out of this script than would seem possible.

But the play itself? Well, Margulies didn’t win any Pulitzer for this.