'The Ugly One' at Walnut: Convoluted story about face value

Everything is going just fine for a guy named Lette, a married man with a string of patents for electronic inventions, until one day people all agree that he's remarkably ugly, in case he hasn't noticed.

He hasn't - and that's the first thing that makes you wonder about German playwright Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One, which the Walnut Street Theatre is presenting on its small third-floor stage with a gusto that lifts the piece a few notches.

Lette (richly played by Ben Dibble, whose sincere character interpretation heightens the cartoonishness around him) goes in for plastic surgery and comes out with the world's most strikingly beautiful face.

He has turned a painful revelation into a life-changing elation; for all gorgeous men and women, existence is constantly as beautiful as they are, or something like that. Just what, I can't say. Mayenburg seems to be telling us a thing or two, but his play is compromised by its convoluted nature - one part fantasy, another part comedy, another truth-telling, and yet another, the absurd. Rather than blending, these various elements compete, and The Ugly One feels shallow.

It considers conformity, narcissism, and perception, and except for a cleverly staged surgery scene, the laughs it spawns are moderate. Most of the good ones are not scripted lines, but sound effects smartly created by Paul Winnick. Lette is the sole real person in The Ugly One, the other characters being either part- or full-blown buffoons: his bewilderingly fickle boss, his wife, his eventual mistress, her fey son, and a quackish plastic surgeon.

Under Debi Marcucci's direction, The Ugly One moves fast - it's an 80-minute one-act - and despite the play's schizophrenic quality, the production is entertaining. Sarah Gliko, Bill Van Horn, and Noah Mazaika play several roles apiece, sometimes smoothly switching characters in a split second.

After a while, you can even buy into the idea that Lette's face has changed - that he was ugly at first and now is Prince Charming times 10 - although nothing about his looks differs from the first line to the last. Maybe there's a message in that, too. But in this play about appearances, you can't get beyond the face of it.