SUBLIME FRENZY IN FRAYN’S ‘CHINAMEN’

“Chinamen,” a one-act by British playwright Michael Frayn at Room for Theatre, is a delicious divertissement about a host and hostess hurtled into growing panic at a dinner party in their London home.

The production (sharing a double bill with the English comedy “Dock Brief”) unravels like a silk scarf in a windstorm but never for a second blows off course. It features terrific performances by Rick Friesen and Shannon Sullivan as a nervous couple awaiting and receiving dinner guests who can’t stand the sight of one another.

The pacing and timing under first-time director Michelle Mindlin is so choice that the frenzy is sublime rather than harried. Adding immeasurably to the amusement is the quick-change artistry of Friesen and Sullivan, who are the only actors in the production.

Their bouts of repartee as they try to hide one drunken guest (Friesen again) in the kitchen while cajoling other and unseen guests to stay out on the patio is vivid and witty. Set design is crucial to the success of such a light farce, and Rolf Darbo and Gary Wissmann’s stairs, doors, and nooks create a blithesome interior.

The play is from a quartet of duologues called “The Two of Us,” originally staged in London in 1970.

The curtain-raiser is a quirky variation on John Mortimer’s “Rumpole of the Bailey,” and it is the identical production the theater staged in November, 1984, with the same director, Norman Cohen, and the same actors, John O’Connell and F. William Parker. It’s a production worth reviving.

Parker plays an unsuccessful barrister eagerly taking on his first client, and O’Connell portrays a droopy, confessed wife-murderer who patronizes his barrister’s futile efforts to defend him because he doesn’t want to hurt the poor guy’s feelings. The actors are excellent and indeed look like they’ve been playing together for a long time.

Performances are at 12745 Ventura Blvd., Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, 8 p.m., through May 27; (818) 509-0459. Tickets: $7.50.

‘ONE HUNDRED TIMES . . . I SHOULDN’T’

Maybe something got lost in the translation. “One Hundred Times . . . I Shouldn’t,” alternating in Spanish and English at the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, is a comedy by Argentine playwright Ricardo Talesnik, directed by Buenos Aires-born Hugo Quintana.

The suspicion is that the play’s hypocritical family uproar over a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy might play much better in Spanish, if not in Latin America. Here the humor is dated. And the exaggerated acting style of the neurotic mother and father (Wilma Bonet and Tonyo Melendez) is almost slapstick.

That puts a terrible burden on what is a solid and convincing performance by the flavorful Odalys in the role of the independent-minded daughter. The three swains in her life (hotshot Armando Molina, nerd Hector Herhandez, and debonair Carlo Allen) are fine. But the show’s theatrical imbalance shoots it down.

Performances are at 421 N. Ave. 19, Lincoln Heights, in English, Thursday and Saturday, 8 p.m., in Spanish, Wednesday and Friday, 8 p.m., and Sunday, 3 p.m., through May 31; (213) 225-4044. Tickets: $12.

‘KING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE’

The world inhabited by the five characters in “King of the Crystal Palace” at the Richmond Shepard Theater is sharply felt, as if playwright C. D. Arnold were re-creating a memory from his past.

The drama is framed by the years 1973 and 1980, as a young man reconstructs the recent travail in his life. But that life, centered around the departure and return of a homosexual lover, comes off as banal and whiney. In the prolonged first of two acts, events unfold slowly and self-consciously.

The rewards of the show are a strong sense of time and place and a fully textured and convincing performance by Steven Patterson as the entitled hard-leather figure and sulky playboy of the male world. Those purplish marks on his hands at the end of the play signal the then-unknown AIDS crisis-to- come.

The play’s abandoned protagonist, however, is callow and adolescent, and actor William Hayes (the author of “Midnight Express”) is too shrill to give the character dimension.

As for atmosphere, director-designer John Sowle puts you inside a tattered Victorian house south of Market Street in San Francisco. Most of the play is set in 1973, and love and Angst and drugs are seen through the haze of that post-’60s hangover.

Taking in gays in her cluttered house is the specialty of a frayed feminist whose liberality masks personal exhaustion. Susan Burke delivers a worn portrait of an ex-hippie who’s compelled to change her life. Ken Harris and Vic Trevino credibly convey other denizens.

Homosexuality is incidental to the play; this is a scratchy tone poem to self-absorbed people who aren’t very interesting. But there is a freeze-frame quality to the bygone time.

Performances are at 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Thursday through Sunday, 8 p.m., through June 7; (213) 462-9399. Tickets: $10.