STAGE REVIEW : New Ensemble at Odyssey Starts Season With ‘Top Hats’

There’s a party going on at the Odyssey Theatre. It’s loud, raucous, vulgar and strangely mystical. It goes till dawn, of course, and by the time morning rolls around, some people are changed. . . .

Artistic director Ron Sossi has chosen well the play with which to launch both his 1988 season and his self-explanatory new ensemble of Latin Actors And A Few Others (LAAFO). “Three Top Hats” by Spanish writer Miguel Mihura dates back to 1932 but creates an amorphous ambiance of suspended animation that makes it true to almost any place at any time.

In Sossi’s vivid staging at the Odyssey, we’re “probably in the 1930s in a hotel room somewhere on the Spanish seacoast,” according to the program. In another note, the director acknowledges the probability that Mihura wrote “Three Top Hats” as a metaphor for pre-revolutionary Spain, but the play’s achievement is not that it addresses itself to a single event, but that it can take on associations it never had in mind. For instance, there are connections between “Three Top Hats” and John Bunzel’s 1985 “Delirious,” another raucous party play that questions (as, peripherally, does “Three Top Hats”) the legacy of a society.

While it’s not a perfect play and seems saddled, in 1988, with some extraneous baggage, the whimsy and edge of absurdity in Mihura’s fantasy is reminiscent most of Anouilh or Giraudoux with an indigenous streak of purely Spanish chauvinism.

In a nutshell, a perfectly tame Don Dionisio (Alan Abelew) comes to spend the night before his wedding at Don Rosario’s (C. Thomas Cunliffe) small hotel. But there’s no sleep to be had. A troupe of itinerant vaudevillians is putting up there for the night and the artistes all keep late hours. They party, brawl and celebrate, using the beleaguered Dionisio’s room as a public thoroughfare.

He’s swept up in the confusion like a leaf in a storm. Nothing much happens beyond the comings and goings and the laughter and romantic equations that form, dissipate, clash and back off. But an involuntary transformation comes over Dionisio. A world of ardent possibilities opens up, especially in the person of one fiery, volatile dancer named Paula (Ana Helena Berenguer). Suddenly, the prospect of his marriage the next morning takes on both less reality and less allure.

Political metaphors aside, there is a hyper-reality to the piece, carefully underscored by Sossi’s rambunctious direction. Like most parties at this level of overexcitement, Mihura’s becomes a twilight zone of unexpressed longings, unattractive desires and mysterious self-revelations.

The play is long (that noise eventually takes its toll) and suffers from Marcia Cobourn Wellwarth’s translation that isn’t as idiosyncratic as it could be. The acting ranges from the exuberant to the chaotic--a built-in peril in this kind of piece, where it takes twice as much control to portray people seemingly without any.

Berenguer as Paula starts out by over-emoting, but grows stronger and more assured, ultimately winning us over as completely as she wins the defenseless Dionisio. She seems a more disciplined dancer than actress (although nothing too demanding is required in Michael Rooney’s apt choreography) who can trade, and does effectively, on a magnetic core of vulnerability.

You can’t help rooting for Abelew’s Dionisio, a Woody Allen occasionally overwhelmed by the furious, farcical pace, but mostly negotiating the range from nebbish to sweetheart like a clown on a slack rope. Beth Hogan and Stephanie Cushna make a notably designing twosome as giggly Bobbsey-twin types, and Daniel Addes impresses in a stern cameo as Dionisio’s future father-in-law.

Beyond this, the LAAFO ensemble makes up in ebullience what it contributes in raggedness. It still has a way to go as an ensemble, but in a play where characters behave wildly and include a bearded lady, performance shortcomings are minimized. Don Llewellyn has provided a stark but flavorful Spanish setting, backed up by Sossi’s tastefully eclectic and very Spanish musical selections. They create sinew and backbone for the play.

If not perfect, this “Three Top Hats” is a zestful introduction to a very special play.

Performances at 12111 Ohio Ave. run Wednesday through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., indefinitely. There will be no performance April 3. Performances April 10 and 24 will be at 3 p.m. Tickets: $13.50-$17.50; (213) 826-1626.