‘ROAD RUNNERS’: A NIGHT TO STRANGLE

Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono appear to have inspired “Road Runners at the Paradise Drive-In” at the Cast. This one-act depicts a typical night out for two cousins, former altar boys, as they stalk and slay two sisters who are watching cartoons at a drive-in theater.

Andrew De Angelo’s staging is grisly and intense. Co-authors John Del Regno and Raymond Martino deliver showy performances as the clever bully and the impressionable follower, respectively, and Ninon Zenovich and Andrea Ucci are just as distinctive as the victims.

The play begins to generate the sort of stomach-clutching horror that’s available to moviegoers more often than theatergoers. However, the literary sensibilities of the playwrights (Thomas George Carter along with Del Regno and Martino) intrude.

The smarter of the victims is a grammar-school science teacher, which gives her the excuse, early in the evening, to talk about scientific theories that offer hope for humanity. Her talk jars the ex-Catholicism of the killers and leads to a philosophical/theological disquisition that resumes while the strangling is taking place. At this point, the nail-biting ends.

One almost expects the hapless woman to use her last breath to point out the irony of the fact that two men named John and Milton are killing her at a place called the Paradise. But then, she teaches science, not English.

The writers want to make a statement, to salvage something from the wreckage, so to speak. But their search for motivations and meaning seems facile, compared to the actual facts of a case like the hillside stranglings. They’ve given it the old college try, and their play ends up sounding . . . collegiate.

Performances are at 800 El Centro Ave., Mondays through Wednesdays at 8 p.m., through Wednesday (213) 462-0265.

‘THE BIG BALLGAME’

Vietnam veteran Michael Herber is too close to “The Big Ballgame,” the war chronicle he wrote and directed.

Herber’s hero is apparently based on himself, and he’s quite a guy. Counselor, buddy, man of action--that’s Lt. Michael Slater. He finally gets into trouble late in the second act, but it’s clear he’s blameless. Virtually with a snap of the fingers, the problem vanishes. No wonder they call him Mr. Lucky.

To be fair, the other soldiers are as nice, if not quite as capable, as Slater. With the exception of one minor stick-in-the-mud, everyone here is nice. It’s an odd way to write a war play.

We do see one of Slater’s buddies cracking under the pressure, but he cracks before we feel the pressure, and then he’s gone. Hints that someone in the play was culpable at My Lai are bandied about, but finally it appears that the subject is mentioned simply to vindicate present company. As for the Vietnamese, we hear stories about their tricks, but they remain offstage. So does the one soldier whose lies almost put our hero in the brig.

Most of the action remains offstage too. This becomes especially problematic in the second act. We hear reports of fierce fighting, but all we see are officers hovering around a radio receiver. At times, we haven’t even met the men who are in the thick of the action. The fighting becomes abstract and hard to follow.

“The Big Ballgame” catches the camaraderie of war but avoids the conflict. At least Herber didn’t cast a conventional good looker as himself; Daniel Radell’s Slater is charming but long-faced and gangly. Stephen N. Andrews, Mark Parra and Jeff Jerome also do nice work; now Herber should go beyond nice.

Performances are at McCadden Place Theatre, 1157 McCadden Place, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m., indefinitely (213) 851-3771.

‘HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN’

The title “Home Again, Home Again” reflects the problem with Alice Sexton Thorp’s play at the 21st Street Theatre. Thorp uses that old standby of a situation--a reunion at a funeral--to examine that old standby of a subject--the midlife crisis of the first wave of baby boomers.

The characters are fairly engaging, and sometimes funny, but they aren’t fresh. “Home Again, Home Again” needs a good jiggity-jog--something that will set it apart from the pack of similar scripts.

Thorp examines three siblings who have gone in different directions. Franklin (Scott Hunter) and his wife (Karon Wright-Hoffman at the performance I saw) are frazzled liberal social workers; Claire (Niki Merrigan) is a divorced socialite at odds with her teen-age daughter (Anne Davis); Tommy (Larry Moskowitz) is a self-made businessman who brings his latest secretary/bimbo (Teri LaPorte) to the funeral for dear old Aunt Katherine.

In a post-funeral gabfest, the siblings gradually transcend recriminations and find common ground, not only in their memories but also in their awareness that they’re now the older generation.

Thorp writes fluid dialogue, particularly in an extended passage on the meaning of middle age. But nothing unexpected happens, and the final image is so flat that it’s almost as if Thorp doesn’t want us to remember it the next morning.

Despite a few bobbled lines the other night, Carl Walsh’s actors know their characters well. Hunter’s bedraggled quality is especially appropriate, and Merrigan displays fine comic timing. Only LaPorte is miscast; she’s too old for the too-predictable role of the bimbo.

Performances are at 11350 Palms Blvd., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., through April 13 (213) 827-5655.

‘THE WHITE SEAL COAT’

“The White Seal Coat,” at Theatre Exchange, is nothing but a premise. A cranky old woman wants to leave the latest in a long line of convalescent homes and live with her son and his wife, who resist the notion--and that’s that. The narrative goes no further.

Marion Wagman’s play keeps going, though, awkwardly agonizing over the same conflict. At the end, the mother (Danna Hansen) is still crabby and recalcitrant, her roommate (Lillian Adams) is still a relentlessly cheerful and accepting counterpoint, and the son (Nathan LeGrand) remains on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

With material this static, and with lines that lean toward the sappy (“we all have a little feel-bad place in us”) or the artificial or even the inexplicable, the actors are trapped in stereotypes.

Paul Cutone’s lighting design also underlines the obvious, and the whole show seems under-rehearsed by director Russell Bekins).

Performances of this co-production between Theatre Exchange and Theatre of NOTE are at 11855 Hart St., Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., through March 30, with a 2 p.m. matinee this Sunday only (818) 766-5745.