MOCA SERIES : ‘CARNAGE’ LAYS WASTE TO ZEALOTS OF EVERY STRIPE

God knows what Tim Robbins and the Actors’ Gang had in mind when they started to work on a new piece for the Angels Flight series at MOCA six weeks ago. Maybe just a title--”Carnage: Final Assembly.”

Whatever the aim, they have come up with something. This is more than a piece. It’s a play, as rude and as mocking as something that Aristophanes might have knocked off, if you can imagine Aristophanes taking on America’s TV preachers and survivalists.

In fact, that’s not too hard to imagine. Aristophanes loved to pull the rug out from under zealots. What is hard to imagine--but I’m sure I didn’t, at Thursday’s opening--is how this show manages to be as American as a crushed can of Coors, and yet to convey the eerie sense of a Japanese ghost play.

“Carnage” is a spoof, to be sure. Lee Arenberg portrays a revivalist preacher called the Rev. Cotton Slocum, a gentleman so full of himself that he has swelled to the dimensions of a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. He also seems to have had a microphone implant: Every word he utters is a public address.

(The voice suggests that of Richard Nixon, but without circumlocutions. The Rev. Slocum comes right out and says what he’s after, which in this case is the money. The Lord helps those who help themselves.)

For the first moment or two, the show looks like a sophomoric burlesque--”Elmer Gantry” brought up to date. But almost immediately the hyperbole seems funny and comfortable, and not unjustified by recent events. In its way, the show is celebrating Rev. Slocum. He’s so awful he’s wonderful, and he’s certainly alive.

But then (here comes the eerie part) he’s dead.

An incendiary device possibly connected to “incidents in the Persian Gulf” has exploded at an Indian monument. (As they used to say in movie ads, this piece was torn from the headlines.) The explosion takes Rev. Slocum out of the picture and ought to take him to his eternal reward, which he figures to be even more gratifying than his earthly goodies.

But for some technical reason he just can’t ascend. His spirit, now looking fairly tatty, bangs around like a grounded balloon. (The hillbilly guitar music now takes on the sliding twang of the Japanese samisen .) He can’t even get into his own funeral at his own theme park!

By this time we have decided that Rev. Slocum is a good deal less appalling than the man running the funeral, his successor, a self-righteous young zealot named Tack (Ned Bellamy). He has the dark charisma of a survivalist; the paranoia of an American Ayatollah. And one of the piece’s strengths is that we feel this charisma. Our laughter becomes rather nervous now: We’re no longer sure where this piece is going to go.

It never gets out of control, but it comes close to the edge when we see how Tack turns a happy drunk named Ralph (Brent Hinkley) into an eerily smiling commando in the Army of the Lord--by a kind of sacramental mugging.

We’re as startled as Ralph’s happy little TV-watching wife (Shannon Holt), a character whom we now longer feel like patronizing. We now cling to her as the moral center of the piece, the only one who isn’t either dead or crazy.

If “Carnage” sounds wild, it is. But it creeps up on you, and it always leaves the audience an out. This is a cartoon, we can always say, not real life.

But the evening tells more about the outrageousness of the last few months--the Tammy and Jim Baker scandal, the Iran- contra hearings, the events in the Gulf--than any commentator I’ve read. Whatever Robbins and his gang had in mind, they tapped a vein.

There are three more performances this weekend, at 2 and 8 p.m. today, and at 2 p.m. Sunday. Final performances are Thursday through Aug. 30. Final performances at MOCA, that is. This piece will have a life. Information at (213) 626-6828.