A GOLD-DUSTED ‘TEMPEST’ IN TOPANGA

When the Topanga-based Theatricum Botanicum explores the lighter, more fantastical works in Shakespeare’s canon--”A Midsummer Night’s Dream” or “The Tempest,” which opened there Sunday--theatrical gold dust seems to fall over the canyon. Despite a clunky opening, Ellen Geer’s production usually avoids the summer stock blues that have bogged down this theater in recent years.

Harry Frazier might seem too old for the exiled Prospero, but he exudes a venerable warmth and speaks with a light, lively tongue that utterly transcends any age. With all his magical powers, Frazier’s Prospero seems both fed by the salty sea and hungering for more human contact.

This despite a very felt relationship with daughter Miranda (Melora Marshall)--in his long robes, Frazier almost seems maternal. Marshall, in turn, is tomboyish; when Rick Biggs’ Ferdinand appears and turns her on, her womanly transformation is all the more dramatic.

Geer, though, should take another look at Miranda’s and Ferdinand’s marriage: It’s an unintentionally comic pagan rite, as if done by precocious high schoolers imitating the Living Theatre. The other comic elements, especially Stephano and Trinculo (Mark Voland and David Johnstone), are cleverly realized. Above all, Ford Rainey’s Caliban (in a starkly reptilian costume by Stephen Bishop) provides the show with a vulnerable monster at rich, tragic level.

Performances at 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga, run Sundays, 3 p.m. through Aug. 24. Tickets: $5-$8 (children under 12 free); call ahead, as cast members alternate roles: (213) 455-3723.

‘GOD’S BLIND EYE’

The pipe-dream play--that legacy left to American theater by “The Iceman Cometh” and O’Neill’s deluded souls--is a dangerous genre for the dramatist. Dura Temple, alas, shows how dangerous in her new play about dreamers, “God’s Blind Eye,” at the 21st Street Theatre.

Almost immediately, we know that ex-circus performer Wanda (Carol Navratil) won’t be admitted into the local (Fillmore, Calif.) chapter of Eastern Star. We know that her daughter, Maya (Suebel McNulty), won’t go off with her vagabond brother, Frankie (Marc Royston, with Steve Apostolina alternating). These are people with Tragic scrawled on their foreheads, and Temple only delays the inevitable with wordy family feuding.

To be sure, the classics abound in tragic inevitability. What really impairs “God’s Blind Eye” is its dewy-eyed view of folks hitching their wagons to falling stars (Maya, true to her name, is a big heaven-gazer). Instead of a taut drama, we get a constellation of symbols: Owls wake Wanda up, a circus freak named Crawdadman is penned up in the front yard, condors nest in the hills above their home (an anachronism with unintended tragedy).

Navratil and McNulty etch surface-level performances, doing little to work against Temple’s predictable characterizations. Tim Flugum as a boringly sincere Fillmore guy who loves Maya takes his blandness a little too much to heart (Royston alternates). Carl Walsh’s lights don’t glimmer, but director Greg Norberg and Kiloh Fairchild’s set is pure suburbia (why, though, must the actors enter from around the rear of the house?).

Performances at 11350 Palms Blvd., Windward School, run Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., until July 26. Tickets: $7; (213) 827-5655.

‘LIFE OF THE PARTY’

Doug Holsclaw’s schematic and arch “Life of the Party,” at the Celebration Theatre, portrays another victim of AIDS’ deadly scythe. Lacking irony and the iron fist of an editor, this study of four friends dealing with a plague and safe sex self-destructs as it presses all the melodramatic buttons.

Brad (Duane Boyer) loves to be his pals’ party host. Andrew (L. W. Paulus), Curtis (Michael Gerard) and Jay (David Stebbins) drop by, play games and watch Hayley Mills movies. Andrew and Jay launch into a stormy affair (Jay thinks safe sex is “boring”). Curtis hooks up with a trendy jerk (Michael Kearns). Brad’s bathhouse days then come back to haunt him.

“Life of the Party” is so patently cliched that the obligatory hospital scene is handled by Holsclaw and director Kearns like an ultrapoetic, ultratheatrical leitmotif. Kearns directs with such strained seriousness that no one in the cast can break out of this vise of a script with liberating energy.

Performances at 426 N. Hoover St. run Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 7 and 10 p.m., Sundays, 5 p.m. through July 26. Tickets: $10; (213) 876-4257.