‘Clutter’ storyline gets lost in messy translation

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Updated: March 12, 2012 8:04AM

There is just something about the story of the Collyer brothers — those aristocratic New York hoarders of the 1930s and ’40s — that continues to fascinate us. And in “Clutter: The True Story of the Collyer Brothers Who Never Threw Anything Out,” now at the Greenhouse Theater Center, playwright Mark Saltzman gives us his quirky take on just what compelled the two men to load up their vast family home on upper Fifth Avenue with tons of newspapers, musical instruments and scavenged junk, and essentially wall themselves off from the rest of the world.

Tone is everything in telling a story like this. And Saltzman, who has devised a parallel fictional story about two brothers on the New York police force who investigate the Collyers’ death, opts for a combination of madcap and serious that never feels quite right or, in director Wayne Mell’s production, quite at ease with itself.

A certain form of mental illness and codependency (to use the trendy term) clearly played a role in the fate of the Collyers — Langley (Andrew J. Pond), the failed classical pianist and dandy, and Homer (Edward Kuffert), the miserly lawyer who prides himself in his family’s Mayflower and shipping business legacy, while his hatred of banks and utility companies strikes a modern chord. These psychological problems begin to blossom more fully after their eccentric physician father moves away and issues a command to Homer to look after his brother. Although Homer tries to assert his independence, at one point he fails. When his health suddenly takes a downward turn, a surprising role reversal occurs.

The play’s fictionalized siblings are two Irish-Catholic brothers — Sgt. Reilly Dolan (Joe Mack), and his younger brother, patrolman Kevin Dolan (Michael J. Bullaro), who has come back from World War II with some form of post-traumatic stress syndrome. As with the Collyers, there is both love and tension between these two, with Reilly over-protective and overly controlling of Kevin.

When Homer is found dead and Langley is nowhere to be seen, the cops pursue the many questionable leads. Meanwhile, we get flashbacks to the Collyers’ relationship, interlaced with several winning little memories of 1940s New York, including the construction of the United Nations building (which triggers one of the play’s funniest lines), and Idlewild Airport (subsequently JFK) in Queens, where potatoes once grew.

The actors do what they can with Saltzman’s uneven script, and Andrei Onegin’s set tries to conjure the pileup in the Collyers’ “mansion” on a small scale. But this story demands something deeper than light tragicomedy.