Review: ‘Kidnapped by Craigslist’ @ Elephant Lab

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When Craig Newmark founded Craigslist in 1995, he could hardly have foreseen its eventual scope, let alone ‘Kidnapped by Craigslist’ at the Elephant Lab. This ambitious production by TheSpyAnts attacks Katie Goan’s and Nitra Gutierrez’s freewheeling specialty piece with insidious verve.

Using a carnival theme to launch its twisted collage of actual postings, scripted material and live music, ‘Kidnapped’ has plenty of hysterical moments. Lori Evans Taylor stages the proceedings with noteworthy panache, weaving her antic cast (with alternates) around designer Matt Maenpaa’s velvet-curtained set like feral magician’s rabbits. From the opening of Amy Motta’s barker slithering out of a trunk to welcome us as her colleagues do a freak-show parade, we are in for something unapologetically self-circumscribed.

Goan’s and Gutierrez’s text combines virtual realizations of website topics — ‘My Co-Worker Eats Everything,’ ‘Reply to: My Co-Worker Eats Everything’ — with particularized monologues and verbal medleys. Highlights include a televangelist excoriation of all the other sins cited in Leviticus, a pregnant woman tired of having her belly touched and a house-shaking account of dating thwarted by flatulence. Here, as everywhere, costume designer Marina Mouhibian has an inventive blast, which also describes Adam Hunter’s evocative lighting and Taylor’s skewed soundtrack.

The ensemble is unflaggingly adroit. Mouhibian is as droll in her early rant about subway gropes as versatile Danny Lopes is chilling as a mega-misanthrope in ‘I Hate You All.’ Eric Bunton displays great fey timing, Lane Maser carries bone-dry authority, and so forth, with Scott Krinsky’s outsized lunatic inhaling each opportunity at the reviewed performance.

However, for all its lushly appointed, vividly played mayhem, ‘Kidnapped’ seems more of a gloss on sketch-show tactics than a comprehensive theatrical item. This needn’t prohibit attendance, though it’s most likely to gain a following from classified listings website users and fans of National Lampoon.

--David C. Nichols

‘Kidnapped by Craigslist,’ Elephant Lab, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays; plus, 10:30 p.m. Dec 6 & 13, 8 p.m. Dec. 18. Ends Dec. 20. Adult audiences. $15. (323) 860-8786. Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes.