STAGE REVIEW : Actors’ Gang Handles Double Assignment

For a politician, it’s a presidential campaign. For a ballplayer, it’s the playoffs and World Series.

They’re the ultimate, long-distance tests of professional mettle. What’s the test for actors?

Performing the epic is one, as Peter Brook’s actors showed us last year in “The Mahabharata.” Performing two different and challenging shows back to back on the same night (with an hour break in between) is another. That’s the test for the Actors’ Gang every Friday and Saturday night when they stage “Carnage” and “Freaks” at the Tiffany Theatre.

But this ensemble (14 in “Carnage,” 12 in “Freaks”) moves through the two disparate plays with such command of the material that this is one exam for which they barely seem to break a sweat.

And disparate as the works may be, the repertory pairing of a dark satire on fundamentalist Christianity (“Carnage”) and a both whimsical and ghoulish look at a backroads carny (“Freaks”) ultimately makes it impossible to think of the one without the other.

For one thing, both shows are about show business and the art of putting on an act. In the first minutes of “Carnage,” the Rev. Dr. Cotton Slocum (Lee Arenberg) is vainly teaching young Deacon Tack (Ned Bellamy) the choreography and vocal tricks for working a crowd into a lather. Tack isn’t getting his lines or hitting his marks, but that’s deceptive.

In “Freaks,” Arenberg’s hobo, D.C. Zimmer, stumbles into the freak show and almost becomes part of the show. Bellamy’s Floyd K. Emrod, by contrast, barges into the tent, trying to impress with his own routine.

In both cases, the victors--not necessarily the good guys--are the ones for whom the show goes on. It is so rare to see this kind of dynamic repertory performance that its novelty may cloud the fact that these plays are carefully cast so as to reflect on each other. There’s more going on here than just watching a bunch of young, dynamo actors strutting their stuff.

Take, for instance, Arenberg’s two characters. Slocum is a powder keg of a Christian spectacle ringmaster, yet his innocence underneath makes us pity him when the spectacle falls apart. Zimmer is innocent in a different way--just the kind of sucker who would fall for Slocum’s amazing act.

The great fun of a repertory double-bill is catching the actors who display breathtaking contrast. Though the Actors’ Gang might be accused of being a tad top-heavy with men, it is two actresses--Lisa Moncure and Shannon Holt--who leave the most remarkable, two-faced impression.

Moncure does it (as do most of her company cohorts) while playing multiple roles within a play. In “Carnage,” Moncure plays Tipper, Slocum’s wife; a desert survivalist named Red; a TV news reporter; a yuppie wife in a car crash, and a stern soldier of God. In “Freaks,” she plays, next to Slocum, the most verbally hilarious and blistering role of either show: Arcadia the Amazing, a cynical fortune teller.

Holt switches from Dot Bork, the well-scrubbed wife of a bitter alcoholic (Brent Hinkley, Holt’s real-life husband), to a flesh-eating freak, Iris Panterasangre, who puts the word Grand back into Grand Guignol.

Watch closely for Cynthia Ettinger (a pony-tailed believer in “Carnage” and a tough hermaphrodite in “Freaks”), Hinkley (superb as Ralph Bork and the carny’s master of ceremonies), Jeff Foster (Slocum’s adviser plus three other “Carnage” roles, and Xoltan the Mighty Half-Man), and Cari Dean Whittemore (a cripple, an Indian, a survivalist and a mercenary in “Carnage,” then Pearl the Pig Girl). The list goes on.

As if this multiple-role act weren’t enough, Dean Robinson had to replace J.C. Thom in his six “Carnage” characters last Friday, while also playing his regular three-role routine.

This is one tough gang.

Performances are at 8532 Sunset Blvd. “Carnage” at 8 p.m., “Freaks” at 11:30 p.m., through May 29 (213) 652-6195.