STAGE REVIEW : ‘ALFRED AND VICTORIA’: TALK FOR 2

Donald Freed is writing too much. “Alfred and Victoria: A Life” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center offers valiant performances by Gerald Hiken and Dinah Manoff and an exciting cabaret set by Clifton R. Welch. But Freed’s script is balderdash.

Literate balderdash, I grant you. Kafka, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Shakespeare and the Greeks are among the authors cited: Freed’s Alfred and Victoria enjoy analyzing the Great Books, when they aren’t playing horsy.

Did Alfred Bloomingdale and his mistress, Victoria Morgan, really discuss the power theme in “King Lear” when they were hors de combat ? (Freed also drops a certain amount of French on us.) Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. It just seems terribly pretentious in a play set on a burlesque runway.

The idea of the play isn’t bad. Freed wants to present Alfred and Victoria as figures in a contemporary myth, with Alfred seen as an aging Zeus, all-powerful but not all-potent, and Vicki seen as one of those restorative earth maidens on whom Zeus used to descend, when Hera was away.

A good myth, however, needs a form. “Alfred and Victoria” is little more than a series of conversations--the effect is often that of alternating soliloquies--in which Alfred reveals that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac and that life is written on dollar bills, while Victoria reveals that what she really wants to do is write.

It might have made for dramatic tension if Freed had brought Hera in, but he’s not going to carry this roman a clef business too far. Jon Gottlieb’s sound track does point up Alfred’s ties to the Reagan and, especially, the Nixon Administration, and there are murky implications of conspiracy, without our being clear who’s being conspired against, and for what reason. Vicki, for wanting to have a child by Alfred? Alfred, for falling in love with Vicki?

They do, it seems, fall in love, after all that talk about power--again, not a process that Freed bothers to dramatize. (Manoff and Hiken convey it in a new softness with each other after intermission.) The climax has Vicki joining Alfred in his hospital bed, dressed as a nun. Talk about last rites.

As a sketch on “Saturday Night Live” (also quoted on Gottlieb’s sound track) “Alfred and Victoria” would be outrageous fun, and it would be over in 10 minutes. At LATC it is two hours of oracular nonsense, mitigated only by Manoff’s and Hiken’s skill at imposing some emotional reality on it. If LATC’s Theatre 4 were a real burlesque house, Saturday night’s audience would have been throwing vegetables. Freed can connect politics and the psyche--he did it in “Secret Honor”--but he hasn’t done it here.

“Stained Glass” at the Deja Vu Theatre concerns a teen-age altar boy (Brad Pickett) who has a crush on the most popular priest in the parish (Sean Moran)--who returns it. Patrick Edwards’ play appreciates the conflicts that the affair causes for the priest, but suggests that a 17-year-old who has come to terms with his gayness would sail right through it. Perhaps, but how many 17-year-olds have done so? The play’s big technical problem is that it wants to talk about the situation (including the priest’s trial) rather than to present it. If explanatory monologues are needed, however, we should hear from the boy’s father as well as his mother (Eileen T’Kaye) and his Bishop (Ron Lanza).

Michael Donovan directed “Stained Glass,” which plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays at 1705 N. Kenmore. (213) 666-0434.

‘ALFRED AND VICTORIA: A LIFE’ Donald Freed’s play, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Director Gerald Hiken. Set design Clifton R. Welch. Lighting Douglas D. Smith. Costumes Jill Brousard. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Stage manager Maria Schmidt. With Dinah Manoff and Gerald Hiken. Plays at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2. Closes Dec. 7. Tickets $10-$22. 514 S. Spring St. (213) 627-5599.