Playwright Tom Jacobson’s Bunbury, on now at Long Beach Playhouse’s Studio Theatre, is a tantalizing “What if . . . ?”—asking a question that it wisely never quite answers.

This being a play, it takes a while before we finally hear it, from the title character (an admirably overwrought Stephen Peirick) and his unlikely sidekick Rosaline (Daina Baker Bowler) after they’ve already changed the endings of a half-dozen classics.

“With all these characters so damn happy, does literature retain its relevance?” Rosaline wonders. It’s a good question—but first there’s the matter of Bunbury, who is himself a device.

He’s a “sick friend” invented by Oscar Wilde’s character Algernon in Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest as an excuse to shirk responsibility and get out of town. Bunbury is the fop’s first actual appearance, 113 years later, and he is as displeased with Algernon as the real character is with him.

“You have been perfectly happy. I have been perfectly miserable,” says the cloistered Bunbury, a dandy in a windowpane plaid suit whose love periodically does dare speak its name. (He carries a torch for Algernon like a flamethrower.)

“You made me a verb,” the slighted Bunbury tells him—and indeed Algernon did in Earnest, referring to his out-of-town trips as “Bunburying.”

“A gerund, I believe,” says a dry Jim Felton, perfectly, WASP-ily cast as Algernon.

And here’s the twist: Bunbury, first seen reading Shakespeare, conjures another unseen character with his mind—the off-stage Rosaline from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, who is Romeo’s lover before he meets Juliet. Realizing the power they may have (and how irritating their own rhyming stanzas can be), the two set off through history, largely sans verse, to see what will happen if they . . . rearrange things slightly.

Sounds like a witty little play, and that’s all it would be if the larger question of happy endings didn’t hang over the entire production. We live in a time of many larger questions, which is probably why we seek to lose ourselves in the classic plays—and in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

“Magic is in short supply,” says an aged Algernon, 76 in 1969 at the play’s end (played by David Cramer, who makes it look enviably easy). “It’s difficult to find time to dream.”

Bunbury is not for dreamers—not until afterwards. It spools out onstage like a roller coaster, even if you know your Dickens, Ibsen and Tennessee Williams—which is great for those of us who can’t sit through another production of As You Like It or Our Town. Thinking is good, and your mind has to move quickly here to keep up.

And what if—what if at the end of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, they all went gaily off to Moscow? Wouldn’t that be a whole lot better?

What if the hapless Estragon and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot . . . actually got to meet Godot? The critic Vivian Mercier famously described Godot as a play where “nothing happens, twice.” What if something happened, for once?

And Charles Dickens—what if his spiteful Miss Havisham somehow went on to have 12 children? These are all good questions, even if we’re not immediately left time to ponder them.

“Imagine if they all joined together, we could all change the world,” Bunbury tells his Rosaline after she’s traded her Renaissance-era garb for an early 20th century dress and hat.

“Trying to change the world—what about not making it any worse?” she asks him.

And this returns us to the play’s original question: What about happy endings? In his play’s final moments, Jacobson takes that debate to perhaps its ultimate conclusion. Does it work? Perhaps—but, then, getting there is almost all the fun.

Tags: art, bunbury, Long Beach Playhouse, theatre