STAGE REVIEW : Hollywood ‘Body Language’

It’s not that he doesn’t like you, somebody tells a young actor in Kelly Stuart’s “The Secret of Body Language” at the Cast-at-the-Circle Theatre. It’s the concept of you that he doesn’t like.

Right: This is a play about Hollywood. It’s the first of three shows to be done at the Cast this summer by a group called Heliogabalus. They are all for “the autonomy of the individual theater artist,” as opposed to the bureaucratic thinking that prevails at our larger theaters.

So it makes sense for them to start with a study of a system where the trolls have completely taken over. Here the trolls are represented by Harvey Perr as a casting director who doesn’t use a couch: The desk will do.

Since Heliogabalus was founded by playwright John Steppling and director Robert Glaudini, it’s not a surprise to find the play written in the Steppling mode. Language, for instance, is seen as an invention that makes it possible for a person to deny what he is doing even as he is doing it.

Talent agent Tina Preston, for example, observes that all she wants to do is lead a “normal life.” This explains why she is entertaining Perr at his desk. Later she will entertain the notion of turning her craven actor husband (Jim Storm) into an actual midget to bring him into closer configuration with his role on a nighttime soap.

Storm, however, has learned to stand tall from a book called “The Secret of Body Language.” He has even managed to humble somebody: a former pompon girl who comes out with the most astonishing quotes from the Book of Revelation (Diane DeFoe).

Stuart’s play is officially described as being sinister, and those are the general signals of Glaudini’s production. Perr’s office is lit so as to suggest that it is located underground, and the actors read their lines in a slightly dead way, to show that these are people who can only speak lines. That’s their hell, and they don’t even know that they are in it.

Yet it’s hard to take them as seriously as their author does. Rather than being reminded of “Doctor Faustus,” one is more often put in mind of “Once in a Lifetime.”

The dialogue is awesomely fatuous. “Are you a happy camper?” says Perr to Storm as he interviews him for the soap. “You can at least make eye contact ,” bemoans Preston, realizing that she has lost her husband to the pompon girl. And then, sadly: “These are modern times.”

Apotheosis comes when Preston, in black rubber, briefs Perr about her meeting with their shadowy executive producer, and becomes in effect his channeler:

“He extrapolated that we needed more reality . . . Now we’ll talk demographics . . . There’s so much confluence that we’ve decided to take an alternate approach . . . .”

Talk about speaking in tongues. Funny? Yes. Accurate? No less so than the dialogue in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” though without benefit of Madonna.

Chilling? Finally, no. It’s the dumb, venal Hollywood that we know and love from a lifetime of spoofs, and seeing it through dark glasses doesn’t transform it into a metaphor for the fall of man.

If the play doesn’t quite convince, Glaudini’s actors prove that it’s possible to play zombies without giving a dead performance. Perr makes the casting director one of those rats who actually seem to think they’ve got hearts, a very dangerous breed. Storm goes from being craven to being John Wayne, and back. Preston has the fortitude of the damned. DeFoe manages never once to look herself in the face.

Heliogabalus means business, and its other two summer productions will be worth watching: Michael Sargent’s “Big Boy,” opening July 10, and Steppling’s “Standard of the Breed,” opening Aug. 7.

Plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m. Closes July 3. Tickets $12. 804 El Centro Ave., (213) 462-0265. ‘THE SECRET OF BODY LANGUAGE’

Kelly Stuart’s play, at the Cast-at-the-Circle Theatre. With Jim Storm, Tina Preston, Harvey Perr, Diane DeFoe. Director Robert Glaudini. Set design J. Phillups. Lighting John Fisher. Costumes Lance Crush. Presented by Ted Schmitt for the Cast Theatre and Robert Glaudini and John Steppling for the Heliogabalus Company.