Review: ‘Gallery Secrets’ a thrill at Natural History Museum

The concept of Chalk Repertory Theatre’s “Gallery Secrets,” four short plays performed in the Natural History Museum, is pretty thrilling, especially to fans of site-specific theater and Los Angeles history. And the execution fulfills its promise, up to a point.

Simply being in the museum after-hours makes you feel like a scholar-adventurer. Your footsteps echo in the empty galleries, and the dim lighting lends a note of menace to the impassive stares of the animals in the dioramas.

You’re assigned to a group and led to your starting gallery by an actor, who plays on your feeling of trespass: One dressed as an NHM guide mentions ghost sightings. Two girls in formal wear, sneaking away from their prom, sweep you up in their squealing excitement. Your progression through the four events is choreographed with remarkable fluidity.

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But the transitions are often more exciting than the plays themselves. Commissioned from four playwrights, with four directors, they cover four time periods and a wide range of styles and tones. Several have inventive staging (sometimes you have to follow the actors around) and vivid performances. But you wish equal attention had been lavished on the playwriting.

Each one has promise but feels slight, gimmicky or underthought — as though it could have used another draft or two.

Ruth McKee’s charming love story, “Skins and Bones,” set in 1929 in the African Mammal Hall, wears out its sweet but thin plot well before it ends.

“Prom Season” by Boni B. Alvarez is a sort of “Afterschool Special” in which a meddlesome security guard who blames her misfortunes on prom-night sex tries to divert a teen from the same fate.

Tom Jacobson’s history-laced contribution, “A Vast Hoard,” set in 1913 on the eve of the museum’s opening, has the feel of a skit presented at a board meeting.

And Zakiyyah Alexander’s ambitious, tender “Under the Glass” clearly would like to move beyond the Gem and Mineral Hall in 1978 and must come up with increasingly strained excuses to continue being set there.

Still, the productions are brisk (about 20 minutes each), lively and varied enough to maintain interest and pleasure in this unique and very L.A. evening.

Certain performances — Katherine Sigismund as an emotionally stunted paleontologist; Blaire Chandler as an attention-starved wife — will seize your full attention. If your mind would prefer to wander, you can always look at the exhibits.

“Gallery Secrets,” Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles. 7 p.m. Saturday, Sunday, Oct. 11 and 13. $20 members, $25 nonmembers. (213) 763-3499 or www.nhm.org/calendar. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.