‘NIGHT BREATH’ AT THE ACTORS ALLEY

“Night Breath” at the Actors Alley Repertory Theater is ritualistic drama, bewitchingly staged.

Three rural women gather in the blackened shell of a burned-out barn. The focus of their attention, bundled in canvas and lying in a cart, is the corpse of a young, unidentified woman killed by the fire. Through confrontations and flashbacks, each of the trio purges her own persona and at play’s end claims the dead victim’s identity.

Playwright Dennis Clontz knows his Greek drama. At times his three women rail like the Furies.

Set--irrelevantly, it seems--in rural California in 1907, the work is vivified by actresses Toni Deaver, Carol Sigurdson and D.J. Harner. They are a strange, disturbing trinity as they move toward dawn in the old barn through initiation rites both dreamlike and surreal. Stephen Barr lends strong triple assistance as the dominant male figure in each of the women’s lives.

Director Gennaro Montanino collaborated with the playwright in experimenting with considerably more physicality (the striking of whips as a character cowers under a huge fishnet) than the play reportedly received in stagings elsewhere in the country.

The textured realistic set design by Renee Hoss is terrific, complementing J. Kent Inasy’s ashen-to-copper lighting.

Performances are at 4334 Van Nuys Blvd. in Sherman Oaks, Fridays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., through May 24 (818) 986-7440.

‘CINDERS’

“Cinders,” a West Coast premiere of a Polish play by dissident writer Janusz Glowacki, is a nightmare version of “Cinderella.” Fairy tales always were dark. This production reminds you how dark.

Ably staged by the Los Angeles City College Theater Academy in association with Community Services, the work is an allegory of the police state, in this case set in a girls’ reform school outside Warsaw. A film director arrives to shoot a documentary about the girls presenting a lumpy production of “Cinderella.”

The bureaucratic school deputy (played with curdling decorum by Richard Coven) wants to show the school as all sweetness and light. The director (a vital performance by Alec Franco) has his eye on film festivals in the West and gets the girls to open up on camera about their wretched childhoods--all but the one playing Cinderella, whose integrity won’t allow it.

The play ends savagely when the ill-treated Cinderella (read Poland under Solidarity) brutally destroys herself. The school deputy and self-absorbed film director (read martial law) look on victoriously.

(In 1981, at the height of Solidarity, this play ran in five theaters simultaneously in Warsaw. The playwright now lives here.)

Barbara Coven is a vivid Cinderella; Andrew Daley as the decent, helpless school principal and Robin Rumack as a snarling inmate render good support.

Directed by Al Rossi, the production tends to get lost on the oversized stage. But the experience is nominally Kafkaesque, and that’s not bad. The curtain call has been eliminated to preserve the numbing ending, but that’s misguided. A bow is in order.

Performances at the Caminito Theater, Los Angeles City College, 855 N. Vermont Ave. are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., with a 2 p.m. matinee this Saturday only. Ends May 3 (213) 669-5528.

‘THE TORCH-BEARERS’

Room for Theater has been unfurling plays from the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s for seven years now, and the shows usually contain measures of style and charm.

That’s largely the case with George Kelly’s 1922 Broadway satire, “The Torch-Bearers,” which made fun of burgeoning amateur theatricals in America.

This production is lit up by one performer among the dozen players: Milt Oberman, whose desire and yearning as the tense thespian Huxley Hosseefrosse is genuine comedy. At the other extreme is the blithering, crazed stare of the tiresome leading lady. Neither director Milt Tarver nor actress Pam Galloway allows any distinction between Galloway’s real stage persona and her role in the silly melodrama staged within the play.

The show otherwise is sufficiently farcical to bring off the histrionics of a group of posturing, fledging thespians.

Rob Barron’s wry, doubting onlooker nicely anchors the play’s center of gravity. (Will Rogers played the role, starring with Billie Burke, in the 1935 film version, “Doubting Thomas.”)

Animated support is sketched by Sylvia Walden’s eccentric director, Lou Hancock’s cherubic warmth, and Billy Beck’s impassive stage manager. Actress Barbara Stamm and the slicked-back, owl-eyed Bob Bergen win the John Held Jr. cartoon trophy.

Performances are at 12745 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., through June 8 (818) 509-0459.

‘FORBIDDEN DREAMS’

In case of questions, it is possible for twins to be of different racial color if the parents are a mixed couple and two eggs were fertilized. The issue can come up in discussing “Forbidden Dreams,” at the Cast Theatre.

Playwright Jennifer Smith-Ashley’s first produced play deals with biracial twins (a white sister and her black brother) and mutual exorcisms of Mom and Dad, who have just committed suicide. They meet on the day of their parents’ funeral, in the family attic. It’s been a while. They’re in their early 30s.

In sorting out their turbulent pasts, sister and brother get undressed and into their parents’ clothes--he into mother’s green dress, she into dad’s pants and flashy sport jacket. The play never recovers after that.

Conceptually provocative and spiced with incestuous images, the production is overwrought. Director David Alexander is in over his head. So are the actors.

The material, at an hour-and-a-half with no intermission, probes disturbing psychological territory. It probably reads much better than it plays in this grueling production. The set is terrific--darkly light but aptly scruffy.

Performances at 804 N. El Centro Ave. in Hollywood, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 7 p.m., through May 25 (213) 462-0265.