STAGE REVIEW : WOMEN’S DILEMMAS EXPLORED AT OLIO

The primary character in the text of Austrian playwright Peter Turrini’s “Infanticide”--at the Olio Theatre with Dario Fo’s and Franca Rame’s “A Woman Alone”--is referred to as “She.”

She remarks, regarding a terrifying dream of hers, that she “felt obliterated and happy.” She is accused of committing the crime of the title, and the play constitutes her defense and confession--but it’s one for poets, not for judges. Sylvia Plath is the poet who may come to your mind most readily.

If this sounds like quicksand for the actress, it is--or can be with the wrong actress. But with Judith Hansen as the woman accused, “Infanticide” becomes more clinically hard-edged and emotionally resonant than the standard “poor me” play.

It does so because Hansen’s decisions--such as keeping a distant attitude to “She” while at the same time conveying the sense of being extinguished, of physically burning up inside--seem so attuned to the woman’s psyche that she achieves that rare illusion of making us forget about the actress doing the role. Hansen also is careful not to let us too easily read this woman as conventionally schizophrenic, even though the love-hate pull with her father seems abnormally strong.

Turrini is after a sense of understanding of a wife’s plight, and of what would drive her to infanticide. Hansen’s store of facial and vocal expressions conveys this far more than the play itself, which is awash in the impressionistic bubblings of a woman trying to defend and extinguish herself. Director Louis Fantasia appears to have given Hansen the room to make the dramatic choices she wants to make, in keeping with one of the play’s most direct pleas: Leave women alone, so that they can find themselves, as women, on women’s terms.

The wife’s dilemma is also the centerpiece of “A Woman Alone,” a typically feverish domestic satire from Fo and Rame. It’s the fever of a cartoon, though, not of black comedy, and it can’t help but reduce the humanity of Dorothy Constantine’s Maria.

Whether it’s her husband locking her in the apartment or her wheelchair-bound brother-in-law giving her the business, Maria feels as if she lives only for her men. There’s never an excess of plays that make this point (since there’s a clear excess of plays that exploit women), but the methods Fo and Rame employ strike us in the end as mechanical and unrewarding.

We shouldn’t notice, if this is good breakneck comedy, that Maria can just unlock the front door as plot permits. If it’s this easy, nothing else in the play’s action makes sense. Either she’s a prisoner, or she’s not.

It would help, too, if Constantine gave a more Italian and less WASP performance, in view of the fact that the comedy is chock-full of specific Italian references. Right now, her Maria is halfway between Northern and Southern Europe, and laughs are getting lost in the muddle. This time, director Fantasia seems less careful.

Performances at 3709 Sunset Blvd., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 22. Information: (213) 667-9556.