‘Aleph’ at Boyd Street; ‘Win/Lose/Draw,’ Three One-Acts at Skylight; ‘Lunch Girls’ and ‘City Gents’ at LATC; ‘Remember Me?’ at Inner City

What are Los Angeles’ theater experimenters up to these days? You can find out by traipsing around to disparate galleries and performing spaces, or dropping by Pipeline’s Boyd Street Theatre, where “Aleph (A Point in Space Where All Points Coincide)” is playing.

Aleph is actually the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, but we’ll leave quibblings over title obscurities to others. The show, containing six new pieces--most of them directed by Scott Kelman--is an ideal sampling of the (mostly) well-honed cutting edge in dance, performance art, group comedy and improv. It is shrewd, intelligent programming on Pipeline’s part to start off the new year.

The work that leaves the longest impression is the program’s last, Kedric Robin Wolfe’s comic/dark contemplation on last December’s PSA plane disaster, “There Was A Horse.” Wolfe, a man with an Ichabod Crane-like frame and a Buddha-like countenance, recreates what he imagines happened up there in the sky, like filling in a blank page of history. He builds to a frantic climax, a phantasmagoric description of what it was like inside PSA flight 1771 as it was dropping to earth. He then jumps to an eerier coda of the disaster’s aftermath and a ghastly memory of World War II. This is a piece on its way to becoming a major solo work.

Most of the rest is considerably lighter: The Lost Tribe (S.A. Griffin, Doug Knott, Mike Bruner and Michael Mollett) madly and sometimes sophomorically spoofing the presidential race in “The Tribe Must Be President Out Of Historical Necessity,” or Brooke Harris’ very personal, poetic (even rhyming) improv set cleverly titled “No Net.” Even Will Salmon’s “Heartbeaten,” which, among other things, explores the sonic possibilities of flying a kamikaze mission, is lightly rather than profoundly melancholic.

Gilberte Meunier’s dance company concludes the first act with “Dream Quartet,” a gentle salute to classicism (set to the reverberating string quartet music of Milos Raickovic) that may or may not be about matriarchy’s end and patriarchy’s dawn. Performance art veterans Deborah Oliver and Peter Schroff start off the evening with “Reservations,” an ‘80s gothic pas de deux for a man who plays golf and a woman stuck in an emotional crisis. It is “Aleph’s” only piece that is more glib than communicative.

Performances are at 301 Boyd St., downtown, on Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., through Feb. 6. Sundays, 8 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $8.50; (213) 629-2205.

‘Win/Lose/Draw’

The finest quality that one-act plays can project is the sense that we’re glimpsing only one scene in a much longer story. “Win/Lose/Draw” reveals such authorly legerdemain in not one but all three of its one-acts at the Skylight Theatre.

What the show emphatically is not is a showcase for actresses Priscilla Barnes and Diane Civita. In Ara Watson and Mary Gallagher’s “Little Miss Fresno,” they play two mothers rooting for their daughters in a beauty contest for tots. For one (Civita), this is a weekend’s diversion; for the other (Barnes), this is war. When good performers inhabit familiar characters like these, they end up looking not so familiar.

Watson’s “Final Placement” allows the actresses to switch roles in the power struggle: Now Civita is the one in charge (at a child welfare office), while Barnes creates an intricately detailed portrait of a wasted young woman who seriously abused her child. The mother wants her child back, but she doesn’t even have a chance at gaining visitation rights. By artful suggestion and avoidance of melodrama, Watson, Barnes and Civita show that justice can be enjoined with sadness.

In Gallagher’s “Chocolate Cake,” Barnes and Civita play women full of softly comic vulnerability, often reminiscent of Lanford Wilson characters. Jim Kenney’s set and Kathy Perkins’ lights create a teasingly puzzling opening that only in retrospect is naturalistic.

Civita’s tough New York woman and Barnes’ sweet-hearted small-town wife never clash as we’d expect. The drama is in how they open up to each other about their needs--gastronomic and other. Dorothy Lyman’s directorial hand is so good, it’s almost invisible.

Performances are at 1816 1/2 N. Vermont Ave., on Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $10; (213) 466-1767.

‘Lunch Girls/City Gents’

While watching Jon Lawrence Rivera’s visiting production at the Los Angeles Theatre Center of two Ron Hart one-acts, “Lunch Girls/City Gents,” this reviewer kept thinking: While we get this, New York gets Caryl Churchill’s “Serious Money.”

“City Gents” and the gifted Churchill’s lauded new play are about ambitious young London men in the ‘80s performing trench warfare on the stock market. Briton Hart has ambitions to see through the Horatio Alger myth, darkly, but the more he mimics much of Churchill’s satirical style of pillorying the powerful, the further “City Gents” descends into the preposterous. Rivera’s cast only helps the descent, led by Dean Cameron’s weakly accented gent.

At least “Lunch Girls” has something more than cartoon characters. The problem is, Hart doesn’t know how to develop them. Bee (Chantal Contouri), Dee (Kate Fitzmaurice), Vee (Elizabeth Savage) and Jay (Shannon Sullivan) are friends who keep trying to get together for lunch, foiled by busy schedules. By phone, they continue to arrange a rendezvous while trading gossip. We learn that Dee and Jay were one-shot lovers. Husbands die, families grow, but these women keep on gossiping. “Lunch Girls” particularly shows Hart to be a shallow writer.

The production design (Robert Farthing’s set, Todd A. Jared’s lights and Mark Friedman’s sound), inventive and energetic as it is, depends on too much to keep the momentum going. That, of course, should be the play’s job.

Performances are at 514 S. Spring St. on Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays, 2 and 8 p.m., through Feb. 21. Tickets: $15; (213) 933-6824.

‘Remember Me?’

James A. Hawthorne’s “Remember Me?” at the Inner City Cultural Center contains a rifle, a suicidal woman and a sister who hates her; it is set in an isolated cabin in the woods. The best thing about Hawthorne’s otherwise trite and inadequate plotting is that, despite all these ingredients, he comes up with a happy ending.

In fact, hidden under the surface of the play’s sibling rivalry is a paean to contentment. It’s personified by Earl Billings’ Burks, a rural man at peace. Billings grabs the comedy from the rest of the cast with the ease of an Art Tatum delivering a run on the piano.

Nikki Sanz posseses some of that grace as Adrian, an activist at the end of her rope whose defense is humor. Cheryl Tyre-Smith and Hawthorne James, by contrast, are utterly humorless as a well-moneyed husband and wife who seem loveless despite their visits to the bedroom.

Hawthorne’s first act is too long, but it builds a dynamic between the relations. The second act is done in by basic failure of imagination.

This story deserves a more gripping resolution, and Shirley Jo Finney’s production deserves a more interesting set than what Virgil Woodfork has constructed.

Performances are at 1308 S. New Hampshire Ave., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $15; (213) 387-1161.