JUDGMENT DAY FOR ‘LANDSCAPE’

“The minute something out of the ordinary is found out about someone, our first impulse is to judge instead of to try to understand,” said Judy Weldon, who directs the West Coast premiere of Timothy Mason’s “In a Northern Landscape,” which will open Monday at the Cast-at-the-Circle.

Objective judgment as a first impulse is indeed hard to come by in this play, whose theme is confused anger provoked by the discovery of incest.

Weldon said: “The play is set in Minnesota in 1928, where a father and mother return to the site of their house, which was burned down two years before. (The play goes back and forth in time.) Aside from the family, there are five school friends of the boy. They become his murderers, because they can’t live with what he’s done. They’ve assumed he’s the initiator. The play talks a lot about what we expect of girls and boys and male-female relationships in general, and how society puts people into roles that don’t have to do with what they really are. But I want to emphasize that Mason is not a heavy writer. It may seem unlikely, but the play has a poetic quality and a light-handedness. He doesn’t throw things in our face.”

For those to whom burnt-out homes and the incestuous dead lying in one another’s arms is a heavy specter after the revels of the holiday, two other productions may represent more suitable aperitifs. One is “National Void--The Revue!,” which has just opened at the Access Theatre, and the other is George Kelly’s indestructible “The Show-Off,” which will open Tuesday at the South Coast Repertory.

Of “National Revue,” associate producer Ernest Emling has this to say: “It’s a comedy revue based on tabloids like the National Enquirer which was put together by our cast, which numbers seven, and has songs written specifically for the show. There are also slides and studio monitors to divert our attention while we’re changing settings. Some of the titles of the songs and/or skits are ‘The CIA Stole My Brain,’ ‘Delinquent Dog Terrorizes Family’ and ‘Con Man Pulls Scam on Blind Couple.’ There’s also one about a debutante who lives among cannibals. The one I’d really like to have done is a headline I saw not too long ago, ‘I Had Bigfoot’s Baby,’ but we never could get an angle on that one.”

Sometimes when plans go awry, greater events will ensue (don’t bet on it, though). Elizabeth Diggs’ “American Beef” was scheduled to have opened this week at the South Coast Repertory--at least that was the announcement some time ago. When the play proved not to be quite up on its sea legs yet, rather than rush things, Martin Benson and David Emmes (SCR’s artistic co-directors) went with a quiet favorite. Enter “The Show-Off.” Lee Shallat directs.

“My notion originally was that it was a hard-hitting boy-meets-girl American comedy (it was written in 1924), but to my delight I’ve found it to be much more,” she said. “It’s a slice-of-life bit of Americana that’s a great deal more dependent on character than on plot. The setting is a working-class family with three children in Philadelphia. One of the daughters is grown; the other lives at home. Ron Boussom plays the suitor for the younger girl, the Show-Off, who’s a big, loud, buffoonery, overbearing character. Nan Martin plays the mother, a no-nonsense implacable type. I can see why the play has been compared to Chekhov; it has layers and dimensions, and a contrapuntal relationship between comedy and tragedy.”

Chekhov in Philadelphia? It does have a certain melodious ring.

The Mark Taper Forum’s Taper, Too production of “In the Belly of the Beast” will reopen Thursday--in Sydney, Australia. Each year around this time, Sydney stages an arts festival, two representatives of which visited Los Angeles early in 1984. They had heard enough about the production, which hadn’t even opened yet, to take a flyer on it. Andrew Wood, Carl Franklin and Andrew Robinson, who created the terrifyingly rational portrayal of Jack Abbott, the convicted murderer and author who was briefly the darling of New York’s literary set, are still with the production. Producer Madeline Puzo is also traveling with the cast and reminds us how the play, in its depiction of the product of a prison culture, shows us “not only a breakdown in communication, but how killing in this case is the logical outcome of a moral imperative--survival. It shows us the cultural morality of prison life. Someone commented on the topic by saying: ‘If you want to wipe out malaria, you can’t swat all the mosquitoes. You have to drain the swamp.’ ”

LATE CUE: The long-awaited “Cats” slinks into the Shubert Theatre in Century City Friday.