‘MY LIFE IN ART’ AIMS TO GET BROADWAY’S GOAT

A goat escapes from a farm, heads for the Big Apple and ends up starring on Broadway? In “The King and I”? Did someone put some funny stuff in playwright Victor Steinbach’s coffee?

But wait a minute. Ionesco made us believe that rhinos were taking over the country. Absurdist theater is about speculation, suggestion. Steinbach’s “My Life in Art,” at the Tiffany Theatre, suggests the kind of subterfuge that goes on every day of the week in the bloodthirsty world of show business.

This isn’t to say that Bruce Gray’s production works. It’s often so slow-witted that we find ourselves racing ahead of the action, imagining even darker, crazier schemes for Billy the Goat (Jonathan Frakes).

Perhaps Steinbach, a Soviet emigre with a peculiarly Slavic sense of comedy, needed a kindred spirit--in sensibility, if not nationality--to guide things along. We should see something disturbing looming around the edges of the farmer’s (Sid Conrad) Manhattan hotel room, even before the critic (Richard M. David) or the director (Ron Perlman) frenziedly intrude. Instead, it’s just a hotel room. There’s not enough imagination going on here.

Conrad has the easiest job: The farmer can be played low and mellow, comically contrasting with all the mania around him. But David and Perlman use up all their resources by intermission. So while we can buy the critic becoming uneasy about his professional standing (he’s praised Billy to the skies), we wonder when he talks about flying off to Switzerland to get married. That’s David’s fault, not Steinbach’s.

Perlman, who played a hunchback in “The Name of the Rose,” is still hunching. Billy’s telling the director how to do his job, and Perlman conveys the right sense of shock. But it doesn’t go from there, and all that’s left is Frakes, an actor with an instinct for danger. After you see Frakes, you’ll never look at goats the same way again.

Dorian Vernacchio and Deborah Raymond follow Gray’s conservative ways with a humdrum set and lights, and Gary Stockdale’s electronic score is bloodless.

Performances at 8532 Sunset Blvd. are Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends March 29. (213) 652-6165.

‘THE RELATIVE LINE’

Few themes surpass incest for the sheer power it can generate in the telling. The dramatic voltage may be high or low, though, depending on how it’s handled. In his new play on the subject, “The Relative Line,” at the equally new En Scene Theatre, writer/director Herb Rodgers hasn’t quite decided how to do just that.

The play begins as something of a nightmare in the suburbs, with Ed, the father (Gerald Castillo), wielding a patriarchal sword over his wife (Laurel Adams) and daughters, Antonia (Julie Dolan) and Caroline (Emily Bernie, alternating with Jacqueline Valensi). Ed’s method is buying compliance with gifts: He’ll teach Antonia how to drive, but only if they can still play their “games.”

The neighboring boy (Darrel Guilbeau) is a threat to Ed, and he represents just the right touch of normalcy on the fringe the play needs. For a while, Rodgers makes sure we’re uncomfortable, with weird touches like Antonia talking to her monkey doll and Mom wandering around in an abstract drunken stupor.

But rather than becoming a threatening vision of the breakdown of the nuclear family (Kubrick’s “The Shining” keeps coming to mind), Rodgers’ play itself goes normal, devolving into the kind of feel-good therapy TV movies dole out. At the end, the family is together and Ed’s simply slapped with a 90-day jail stint and some community service. Ho-hum.

Rodgers’ cast is the kind of ensemble better able to convey the everyday rather than the nightmarish. The result is a run-through rather than an interpretation.

The comfortable theater possesses a large performing space (the onstage “exit” sign is an intrusion, though) and a troupe of gremlins in the electrical system, thwarting Jack Hazelton’s lights.

Performances at 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, are Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., indefinitely. (818) 763-3101.

‘ANDALUCIA’

Laura Crockett-Gordon’s premise for “Andalucia,” at the Hollywood-Argyle Theatre, is the kind that should nearly guarantee success. The persecution of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition--imagine the possibilities.

But the best of premises can be capsized by the worst of casts, which Crockett-Gordon, who also directed, has assembled here.

Her tale of ill-fated lovers (Terry Gardner and Rand MacPherson) is intelligently postulated, but the actors haven’t a clue as to how to come to terms with it.

Lines like “He means not to be my uncle” do betray a strained seriousness on the writer’s end, yet MacPherson (as the Jewish Samuel) speaks them to unintended comic effect. He is not alone, however, in conveying the impression that this is a woefully underrehearsed ensemble.

Lee Henry’s opining as the Marquis is not acting, nor is Bruno Marcotulli’s heavy-browed staring as the Padre. Gardner’s Elvira has some spine to her, but all too little, too late.

Center Theatre Group helped with the costumes, and it shows. Nicholas Dorr has fashioned a handsome, very Andalusian set. Lighting designer Paul Cutone, of the Actors Gang, isn’t up to his full potential here either.

Performances at 6240 Hollywood Blvd. are Thursdays through Saturdays, 8:30 p.m., Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends April 5. (213) 466-1767.

‘LIVE LIKE PIGS’

Only a British dramatist like John Arden could come up with a title like “Live Like Pigs,” and stay true to it. An American might try to find some nice way out for the central characters--a family of slobs, thieves, felons, hookers and urchins. With Arden, they live like pigs, and they’ll die like pigs.

A mean spirit runs through this play about the family’s invasion of a housing project, and it’s not levitated by very much wit, even the poking kind. Darryl Rehr’s production at Theatre Rapport has no point of view from which to approach--or, more accurately, attack--the material.

It has no style, skill or life, either. “Upstairs” in the family’s flat means three steps up on Debra Anderson’s terribly cramped set. British accents come and go, and no one here, excepting James Willett’s creepy Blackmouth, suggests a personal history. Arden’s sympathies are unclear in “Live Like Pigs,” but this production doesn’t make us care.

Performances at 1277 N. Wilton Place are Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., indefinitely. (213) 464-2662.