By Keith Kreitman

Theater review

Plays reach local theaters in three ways. If not developed locally, they are honed and proven big-time efforts that filter down, or they are regionally developed originals hoping to pass through on the way up.

“Be Aggressive,” by Southern California playwright Annie Weisman, the current offering of TheatreWorks at Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Theatre, is one of the latter.

It reminds one of early Neil Simon plays where the serious underlying messages were submerged in the irresistible and unstoppable flow of his gag creativity. Weisman is also possessed of a unique humor both orally and physically, which captivates the audience at that level and makes a visit well worthwhile.

But, the spine of this play is the premature forcing into the real and natural world of Laura, played by Daisy Eagan, a 17-year- old “Valley Girl,” steeped in the artificiality of her Southern California materialistic milieu.

In her social world, where spousal abandonment, the size of “boobs,” styles of makeup and haircuts, plastic surgery and social popularity are the currency of everyday concerns, the tragic loss of her mother ejects her from that world of superficiality. She is thrust into the reality of dealing with the raw human needs of her grieving father and her 11 year-old sister’s need for a surrogate mother. At the same time, she strives to become someone who might have an “impact” in the world.

She attempts to find comfort in her cheer leading activities and falls under the influence of another 17-year-old, battered by the abandonment of her own father and her distaste for her mother’s values.

Amanda Duarte is a show stealer in her role as the new friend, Leslie, who seduces Laura into joining her, in a luxury auto “borrowed” from her mother, on a cross country trip to a cheerleading camp where they may hone their second rate talents to competitive excellence.

While Eagan is very pretty, winning and believable in her Laura role, it is Sarah Lord, as the 11-year-old sister Hannah, who is a real find. The playwright has just given her and Duarte the better lines. Ironically, Eagan successfully created this role herself in the first production.

Jackson Davis as Phil, the father of the two girls and Julia Brothers as Leslie’s abandoned mother are very good, but the show really belongs to the three girls and the other cheer leaders Cassie Beck, Rachel Rajput and Makela Spielman.

Weisman weaves in a parallel secondary plot about the building of a freeway over the pristine beauty that first drew them all to that fictional California coastal town of Vista Del Sol. This story of the forces of irresistible urban development is another metaphor for passing from adolescence into maturity.

At both levels - the humor or pain of life’s unhappy experiences - it is an enjoyable play. Weisman has a real ear for the nuances of local dialogue and the raw subject matter of everyday social exchanges, as well as a keen sense of the absurdities of the materialistic life of a community similar to that in which she grew up.

Whether this play will be able to pass on up into the “big time” is questionable. In my view, Laura’s family’s sense of bereavement is never fully, believably scripted and, like earlier Neil Simon, the humor submerges the serious development of character that would make this story a day-after memory.