RANDOM MURDER IN ‘FREEWAY’

“Under the Freeway Sign,” a new play about random murder, features a mesmerizing performance by actor Paul Linke as a serial killer and a chilling image of a victim’s last moments in the hands of casual maniacs.

Staged at the Powerhouse Theater in Santa Monica, the drama is not exploitative but a dark study of sociopaths and a survivor’s ability to redeem grief through confrontation with the killers in prison.

Jack Bender, a film director, wrote and directed in an expressionistic manner. The play caroms between past and present, reality and dreams. Ostensibly, the leading character is a young woman (Laura Owens), whose beloved twin brother (Scott Paulin) hitches a ride under an L.A. freeway sign from two guys in a van and pays the ultimate price.

But, as frequently happens in dramas with strong villains, the bad guys run away with the production. The innocents, the siblings, never ignite attention to their strained but endearing relationship. Their acting is offhanded rather than touching.

This throws the focus to the killers, who work in an auto parts shop (sound familiar?) and who appear only mildly deadbeat until Friday night rolls around. Linke’s scabrous anger and Dennis Redfield’s glassy, childlike sidekick convey a numbing dementia.

The set design (by John Iacovelli) and the lighting (by Paulie Jenkins) are too busy and fractured to make the production sail. What the play lacks is momentum. But the scene seconds before the murder (which itself is not seen) is so strong that you share the terror. Finally, actor/victim Paulin has something to act.

Performances at 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica, run Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Tickets: $12.50-$15. Ends May 16 (213-466-1767).

This production, at the Mainstage Theater in North Hollywood, is illuminated by a pair of endearing performances by Norma Macmillan and Edgar Justice and a sweetheart of a finish that’s telegraphed a mile away, but it doesn’t matter.

Directed by Edward Ludlum and written by one of the play’s four actors, Michael Foley (under the pseudonym of John O’Hare), the play suffers from stiff mechanical structure and a torrent of deadening exposition in the opening acts. It’s later redeemed by a credible unpeeling of human inadequacies and a warm resolution.

The focus, interestingly, is on elderly odd couples, male/female sets of roommates, whose tentative adventuresomeness leads to shared lives and romantic potential. All hands are veteran actors. Macmillan is adorable. Justice, doing his first play in 10 years, is delightfully irascible. Natalie Core is all bravado. And Foley, who stepped in on short notice to act in his own play, needs to tone down his bluster.

Performances at 12135 Riverside Drive, North Hollywood, run Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets: $12-$15. Runs through April 27 (818) 508-0786.

It’s a hot summer night on two Southern California beaches. The stage at the Actors Alley Repertory Theater is covered with three tons of sand. A curling, wormwood fence divides a shingle of beach from a dome of engulfing darkness. The lighting is musty moonlight. The surf gently sings.

This is terrific, mood-inducing stuff, but the people in these two one-acts are not playing mating games. Their imprints leave disorder, visions of personal doom and the sense of players in a playwright’s dream.

The playwright, T.H. McCulloh, is a local drama critic and these are his first produced plays. The nub of the evening is the second and hourlong “Pedro y Junior are drinquin”, impressively directed by Actors Alley artistic director Jordan Charney and vividly rendered by actors Walter Raymond and Clayton Staggs.

They play two buddies, one of whom (the dark and forceful Raymond) has just lost his girl and, we hear in a shattering monologue, might have committed murder. But the character is an actor, a crucial point. He wails a lot and dramatizes passages from famous tragedies. There’s no trusting this guy for a second. Raymond is dynamic but his character’s travail is more wind than surf.

Staggs portrays his softer friend with a gentle owlishness suggesting Bud Cort. He also supplies the beer and the real stinger: that he slept with his friend’s departed girl. Or did he? In any event, it’s checkmate time for his self-destructive friend.

Production is on the grueling side, but its poetic tone is seductive. That is not the case with the cacophonous curtain-raiser, “Something Happened at 7:40.” Eight paranoiac characters shout over each other for 30 shrieking minutes about some unclear threat they just spotted on their semi-private beach. Human fear was never so mortifying. Gordon McManus directed.

Gary Reed’s set and Ann Archold’s lighting are solid production values.

Performances at 4334 Van Nuys Blvd., Sherman Oaks, run Fridays through Sundays, 8 p.m. Tickets: $10. Ends May 16 (818) 986-2278.

Shakespeare may or may not have written this entire mythological adventure tale (the issue remains clouded), but “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” is resplendent with images of the sea, bawdy sexuality and many rich passages that made it highly popular in its time, if not thereafter. Too bad the Globe Playhouse mangles most of it.

Director Tom Ashworth, who doubles as the choric presenter bridging many lands and years, has directed at such a furious pace that gobs of dialogue are incomprehensible. That proves fatal, and the chilly theater (one of the coldest in town) adds to the frustration. Only Eric Menyuk as a flamboyant Lord Cerimon and Cameron Milzer as the enduring Thaisa surmount the muddle. Costuming suggests Dickens more than the Bard.

The play is rarely staged, but its theme of harmony and restoration (a family division healed by a daughter) signals the concerns and some of the magic of later Shakespeare plays.

If you’re a Los Angeles theater history buff, the work (1607-08) presumably was first staged in the United States at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1936 (then called the Pasadena Community Playhouse).

Remaining performances at 1107 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, run today through Sunday. Tickets: $10.50 (213) 654-5623.