STAGE REVIEW : ‘You, Me’ Sparkles in Late-Night Firmament

Late-night theater in Los Angeles, most often associated with improv groups, has a new star. It’s a two-woman comedy called “Just Between You and Me” (subtitled “and Everyone Else and Their Uncle Bob”) at the Eagle Theatre in Beverly Hills.

The production is so burnished and pristine that its hour running time goes by like 10 minutes. The two actors, Janet Lazarus and Jill Wachholz, deliver 17 sketches on the permutations of friendship. They also wrote the material, and it’s unlikely there is a more skilled and gifted comedic duo performing here at the moment.

The show’s director, Randy Brenner, is a veteran of Viola Spolin’s improvisational technique, and although “Just Between You and Me” is not improv, its style and thrust derive clearly from Story Theater’s Paul Sills and the “Spolin Games Players.”

Working with only a few props against a spare set design, the blond Wachholz and the brunette Lazarus, each dressed in black, unfold a collection of characters young and old, bright and dumb. Their work is fluid, flexible, and focused, almost a seminal text, certainly a case study, on the craft of transformation.

There is no clutter here, no sense of hurry. Yet time and stories fly by as we are introduced to a flavorful and at times even poignant gallery of women. Always, of course, the bottom line is humor. Wachholz and Lazarus are not only funny writers but they are artful ones, having structured their show not as unrelated skits but as a coherent and cyclical work.

The characters who open the comedy in a self-service laundry close the show there also. And wedged among other numbers, two dramatic themes are repeated in increasingly funny variations.

One has to do with guilt over memories of childhood tauntings that is resolved by a wickedly funny encounter in a department store. The other motif is centered hilariously in the ladies rest room at a dance club as women slyly check out not only their own but each other’s behinds in the mirror. Raunchy humor here turns golden through the precision of the acting.

Late-night theater has never had it so good.

Performances are at 182 N. Robertson Blvd. (half a block north of Wilshire Boulevard), Fridays and Saturdays at 11 p.m., through April 2. Tickets: $8. (213) 466-1767.