‘WINTER’S TALE’ AT HOME IN BOTANICUM

The outdoor Theatricum Botanicum, nestled in the woods of Topanga Canyon, is such an appropriate setting for “Winter’s Tale,” with its flowers, its folk songs and mead, that Shakespeare’s bucolic atmosphere can seldom have looked sweeter.

Director Ellen Geer (who handsomely essays the role of the wrongly scorned queen, Hermione) takes a play that ranges all over place and time, and briskly marshals events into a comprehensible two-hour afternoon, including intermission. Acoustics in the tiered half-bowl of a theater are excellent, and Shakespeare’s theme of separation and homecoming flourishes well enough.

This was Shakespeare’s second-to-last play, and it looks backward to his attraction to rustics, feasts, oracles and beggars in disguise. It’s also a play about parents and children and, at least in the first act, jealousy. Actor Hubert Kelly’s fit of jealous rage as Hermione’s royal husband, Leontes, underscores Shakespeare’s instinctive sense of human psychosis (anticipating Freud). Kelly’s vocal and physical anger convey panther-like danger.

The surprise of the production is Alan Blumenfeld’s cutpurse peddler, Autolycus, whose feigning and roistering and sheer squatty bulk light up the forest. Herta Ware (wife of the late Will Geer, who created the Botanicum) lends a measure of loquacious crackle, and Anne Reghi’s costumes exuberantly blend into the countryside.

Performances at 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga, at 3 p.m. Sundays, through Aug. 24.

‘WAYSIDE MOTOR INN’

Playwright A. R. Gurney’s technique in exploring 10 characters at a wayside in their lives is initially arresting: We see them in simultaneity, inhabiting the same motel room outside Boston. Of course, they don’t inhabit the same room in reality, so we hear a lot of overlapping dialogue.

The production at the 21st Street Theater features generally well-etched performances, direction (by Gary Gardner) that deftly negotiates the necessary tricky staging and competent if rather washed-out set and lighting values.

The problem with the play is that once the fetching staging device has exhausted your interest--say, early in the second act--the play falls into a conventional pattern of only moderately gripping dramas. That makes it a wonderful test for the actors, however.

None here is weak and some turn ordinary dilemmas into solid craft: notably Sam O’Neal as a decently tacky husband looking for a one-night stand (a performance so truthfully forlorn you may overlook it altogether) and Carl Walsh as another burned-out case divorcing his wife. (A disconcerting miscue here is Walsh’s stage wife, who is too much older than he to make it a believable marriage.)

A father brought to terms by his son and a waitress with an undemanding yen are other convincing portrayals by, respectively, Greg Norbnerg and Kirsten Vance. One actor, Richard Cansino, unfurls terrific physical urgency but is saddled with the comparatively dumb role of a college kid seeking sexual fulfillment.

Performances at 11350 Palms Blvd., West Los Angeles, at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and at 7:30 p.m. Sundays, through July 27; (213) 827-5655.

‘THE BLUE HOUR’

Fans of Pulitzer-winning David Mamet might want to check out two curios from Mamet’s cabaret/curtain-raising/experimental forays. In a refreshing break from time-worn early evening curtains, these two one-acts get under way late night (11 p.m.) under the Camelot Artists banner at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

“The Blue Hour: City Sketches,” first performed as a workshop at New York’s Public Theater in 1979, is pretty self-descriptive, a quintet of urban encounters, alternately featuring 10 actors and all marked by Angst , anger or melancholy.

The second one-act, “All Men Are Whores” (1977), is much less accessible and marked by several verbal excursions into sexual dimensions, subtle and otherwise. The trio of actors (Jan Munroe, Philip Coccioletti and Susan Falcon) drift in shadow, often interlocking in mannered formations.

The dominant tone is brooding: costumes are all identically black and lighting is copperish. Dale Howard directs with a clear viewpoint. Performances at 254 S. Robertson Blvd., Beverly Hills, at 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; (213) 466-1769. Runs indefinitely.

‘TAKING OFF’

Subtitled “An Evening Away From the City,” this premiere of two one-acts by Richard J. Clayman at Odyssey Theater II is disappointingly uneventful. The plays lack momentum and sufficient conflict.

“Los Grandes Pescadores (The Great Fishermen),” directed by Gino Tanasescu, charts a weekend fishing trip among four adult friends, who sluggishly come to grips with themselves in a motel room. Only the Mexican bellhop (Stephen Andrews) and bookish odd-buddy-out (Anthony Duke) bring nominal life to the play.

“Rocky Mountain Sunday,” directed by David Jacobs, centers on a burgeoning romance between a couple of lost souls in a diner (the playwright himself and Leslie Hope, who has a tendency, when the demands become emotional, to shriek too much). But the staging confuses drama with lassitude.

Performances at 12111 Ohio Ave., West Los Angeles, at 8:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Sundays; (213) 826-l626.