Pity the poor guy who lives in a comfortable La Jolla home with a great view.

No, really! There’s always the risk that somebody will come along and wipe out that view. The Coastal Commission, the City of San Diego, even the Supreme Court can’t really do a thing to stop such an outrage.

Ruin looms! Lives hang in the balance! Oh, the horror!

It’s enough to make a playwright write a play. Apparently. And that, Stephen Metcalfe has done. THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS is the name of the piece and it’s in its world premiere right now at Old Town’s Cygnet Theatre.

The title comes from a 1968 essay by Garrett Hardin, which warns that even cherished resources can be destroyed when everybody involved acts only in their own interests. A continuing controversy simmers, according to Wikipedia, over whether Hardin understands the difference between “common property” and “open access.”

Whatever. The hero of this play considers that view his, all his and only his, even after the law is explained to him both gently and roughly. Whatever tragedy is present in this paltry tale is tied up in the survival of that damned view from his terrace.

His name is Dakin and he’s not anybody you’d want to lift a hand for. He jumped, fell or was pushed from his job as a public school teacher and he spends his days writing bromides and stealing smug quotations for an Internet blog, written on his laptop as he sits and stares at, yes, that view.

His wife is understandably worn, given to walking the dogs when her frustration with his aimless rage builds up. (This sets up the best and funniest line in the play “Those dogs are exhausted.”)(I hate to give away an author’s best line, but I feel the need to say something positive.)

The neighbors, old and new, are a sorry lot too. Just the sort of creeps many non-La Jollans suspect inhabit the place. Dakin and wife do have a nice son, a genially non-ambitious DUI attorney. And Dakin suffers abuse from the ghost of the successful son, wiped out in collapse of the World Trade Center and now hanging around as an ineffective goad to his dad.

The arc of this play is a long slide downhill into melodrama. Even when people try to maybe help him out a little, Dakin brushes them off. He claims to have once had friends but it’s hard to see how. The only question left is why, other than the author’s need for comings and goings, people keep coming back to him, trying again.

Probably there’s a metaphor intended here. It would have to be a bleak one.

Sean Murray’s direction is all an author could ask for: deft, solemn, inventive even, to an extent, illuminating. Sean Fanning has provided a plausible set, comfortable with cheesy details, and Shawna Cadence, lacking the resources to sell the concept of an amazing review, successfully stays out of the way. Same for costumer Corey Johnston, assuming that the visitor’s outfits are intentionally awkward.

In the play’s only sympathetic role, Manny Fernandez does the best job of acting – warm, dutiful and sane – as the surviving son. Veronica Murphy, vaguely wrong for the role, makes the wife a mournful victim and Francis Gercke is handsome and vague in the thankless role of the ghost-son.

As the dermatologist next door, Tim West manages somehow to be a pompous nebbish. And Monique Gaffney is a shark bullying minnows as the steely dealer really aching to play the race card, the money card, the female victim card... the whole slimy hustler’s deck.

Probably, Jim Winkler takes this Dakin too seriously. He doesn’t exactly use the Jesus imagery but he certainly is picturesque stewing in his selfish self-loathing. A glimmer of some humor or cleverness might well contradict instructions from author and/or director but the play, such as it is, would benefit.

Why bother, though? There probably are folks in La Jolla and similar enclaves who might identify with somebody in this play but the general attitude probably will involve indifference and disgust.

As for the concept of this being a play about a “commons,” as in something shared by all the public, ain’t that a laugh?

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