Comedy Team Breaks Up the Crowd

Such are Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney’s frighteningly close powers of observation that for at least an hour after leaving “The Kathy & Mo Show, Parallel Lives” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, it’s impossible to look at or listen to anyone without breaking up. After two hours or so in their company, the entire human estate seems to have degenerated into inescapable self-parody.

Najimy is a somewhat pyramid-shaped woman with dark red curly hair and a soft Semitic face that registers suspicion, shyness, sensuality and an endless capacity for being quietly wounded.

Gaffney’s sinuous, dry and sardonic--but no less expressive. Both are first-rate actress-comedians. Their senses of humor afford them their observational angles; their acting skills flesh the angles out with such variety and detail that you can’t catch everything in one visit.

Their work has been favorably compared to that of Lily Tomlin, and from the first moment we meet them as celestial arbiters on some empyrean plain discussing the human design (“Procreation,” says Najimy, “where are we on this?”) to the last when we leave them as weary barflies trading threadbare lines, it does appear that a lot of Tomlin has been beamed into their parallel lives.

We meet women trying to do more with their lives than cope: teen-agers, saloon types, feminists, family prototypes, a pair of high society dames in a restaurant booth. (“I just don’t know what I’m doing with my life,” mourns Gaffney. “Well, you’re not doing anything with your life,” Najimy replies tartly.)

But “The Kathy & Mo Show” is more a matter of exploring a terrain first mapped out by one of our most gifted contemporary artists than it is an acolyte’s slavish encroachment. Like Tomlin, Najimy and Gaffney have a talent for absorbing the tempos, images, phrases and topical concerns of contemporary life and turning them out with an uncanny sense of the symbolic detail.

Their comedy is fueled by compressed, up-tempo realism instead of jokes (now we know that every family funeral gathering has that same tactless aunt who loudly comments on the 15 pounds we’ve gained, as well as that someone who confesses: “If I weren’t related to you, I wouldn’t have the least bit of interest in you”).

And we never know where we’re headed next.

The Women’s Field Trip Study Department leaves our well-fed Jewish lady (Najimy, draped in a tired stole) in a nouveau cuisine class, where she sniffs disdainfully at her lasagna’s ingredients of eggs, spinach and (yuck) kelp. A moment later she hears her nephew confess his love for somebody named Phillip. It takes a moment for this to register (Najimy’s face seems to absorb the news as though it were another exotic culinary item that needs getting used to) before she concludes: “If I can get used to microwave, I can get used to this.”

The audience was spellbound during this episode, just as it was beside itself during Najimy and Gaffney’s rousing sendup of the execrable poetry of over-earnest feminist performance artists in a “Sister-Woman-Goddess.”

The audience was beside itself many other times as well. Najimy and Gaffney have a sharp eye for the gestural style and vocabulary of their people, as well as our tireless capacity for self-delusion, which they treat in a spirit of unsentimental forgiveness. Their considerable talent underscores the notion that what’s funniest is that which is most true.

High marks too for the witty detail of Heidi Landesman’s set, Frances Aronson’s lights and Jon Gottlieb’s sound.

Performances 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, with 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday matinees, through May 29. Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 Spring St., Los Angeles; (213) 627-6500.