‘BEHIND YOU’: LUKEWARM FARE AT CAST

The restaurant in “Behind You,” at the Cast, offers mildly intriguing daily specials-- shiitake mushrooms, smoked salmon with capers, angel hair pasta. However, we soon learn the specials aren’t special; they’re available every day.

We also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the food from the menu tastes better than the trendy specials. After all, as designed by Bob Hummer, the place looks like a dump. The chef, whom we never meet, is likelier to be an old-time cook than a new-wave artist.

The play itself is something like that restaurant. The basic fare is a funny and perceptive study of the restaurant’s serving staff and owner. Yet, playwright John Pappas added a “special”--a focus on one of the waiters and his love life--that turns out to be predictable and (with the addition of several dream sequences) faintly pretentious.

Perhaps the waiter’s story was not so much an addition as the original impulse behind the play, which opens with a murky scene from his youth. Considering that Pappas plays the waiter, this seems likely. Nevertheless, the waiter isn’t sufficiently dramatized. He’s too much the mediator and unchallenged good guy to serve as the central character.

Much better are the scenes which he mediates--conflicts and conversations between the restless senior waiter (Mark Lonow), the desperate Brazilian busboy (Josh Cruze), and the pinched, guarded owner (Larry Miller, whose clouded features invest each line with comic energy). The ending is especially sly; Pappas’ play is lighter than the work of one of his mentors, John Steppling.

It also has a muffled quality that director Laurence Braude appears to have encouraged. Occasional lines and gestures are thrown away too casually. No complaints, though, about the purposely muffled sounds (designed by Jack Rouben) of the customers.

Performances are at 804 N. El Centro Ave., Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m., through May 3; (213) 462-0265.

‘DRY LAND’

“Dry Land,” at the Richmond Shepard, is an evocative portrait of growing up female and fatherless--or what seems to be fatherless--in Southie, a blue-collar enclave of Boston, in 1968.

Playwright Cyndi Coyne plays a woman of her mother’s generation who is a real character--in both senses of the word. As writer and as actor, Coyne doesn’t hesitate to display the woman’s abusive tongue and bigoted perspective, as well as her endearing qualities.

Coyne’s own point of view is through the eyes of this woman’s little daughter (a very natural Ramey Shippen). However, the girl’s dreamy descant, which periodically interrupts the more realistic scenes from a perch above the main stage, is annoyingly oblique and awkwardly staged by Robert Fuhrmann.

Furthermore, the dream scenes hammer home the fact that “Dry Land,” which hasn’t a shadow of a plot, is essentially a private scrapbook instead of a play. Coyne should add something--a narrative, perhaps--that would help involve those of us who weren’t growing up in Boston in 1968.

Fuhrmann has elicited expert performances from everyone, including Rachel Guinan and Darrin Prentice as a pair of hot-to-trot teen-agers. And John Winkler’s sound track is smoothly coordinated with the action.

Performances are at 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m.; (213) 462-9399.

‘SPANISH CONFUSION’

A couple is suddenly enriched by a powerful, mysterious benefactor . . . and they all live happily ever after. That about sums up the story of John Ford Noonan’s “Spanish Confusion” at the Gnu.

In the first act, Noonan leads us to believe that both the donor and the recipients of his largess will rue the day they met. Yet “Spanish Confusion” drops dead shortly after intermission. The talk goes on--much of it, yes, confusing--but the drama stops.

If some of this were funny, it might be easier to take. But aside from some physical business by actor Jere Burns and one funny line (which is repeated into the ground--and which also turned up, uttered by Burns himself, on the premiere of ABC’s “Max Headroom” Tuesday), the laughs are labored.

The play is supposed to be a quasi-absurdist fantasy, but you’d never know it from the realistic style of Jeff Seymour’s staging and set. Perhaps Seymour ought to stick with the old-fashioned slices of life that have served his theater so well.

Performances are at 10426 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m., through May 3; (818) 598-5344.

‘MARIE AND BRUCE’

Wallace Shawn’s mordantly funny account of a day in the life of “Marie and Bruce,” a contemporary shrew and her Mr. Milquetoast, has been staged by Geo Hartley at the Figtree. This time around, it’s easier to figure out why these two stick together--no one else would take them.

This Marie (Pamela Gordon) looks haggard as well as hard; her fuming isn’t quite as furious as Anne Bronston played it at the Odyssey in 1983. She’s older than Bronston’s Marie, and it would take more energy to propel her out of her sad situation. Meanwhile, Bruce (Robert Gould) is dumpier than the Odyssey’s slim-trim Bruce--in fact, Gould is as pudgy as Shawn himself. Except for a wooden reading by the actress playing the dithering maid, the supporting cast is sharp, and the designers have done well with limited resources. Performances are at 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m.; (213) 657-3514.