‘Summer’ a Hymn to ‘40s Innocence

“From a different point of view, people could look at this play and raise questions about morality--but it’s handled so innocently,” said director Jordan Charney of A. R. Gurney’s “What I Did Last Summer” (opening Friday at the Actors’ Alley Theatre in Sherman Oaks).

“It starts out with our hero, Charlie Higgins, saying, ‘This is about me during the (Second World) War, the summer when I was 14,’ ” Charney said. “His mother, Grace, is trying to keep the family together while her husband’s away. She’s also having this ‘little affair’--nothing smutty; it’s almost sweet. Then Charlie applies for a job with ‘The Pig Woman,’ a free-spirit older woman who ends up teaching him about life and making creative choices--again, in a very non-smutty way . . . . “It’s a lovely, charming, sweet, tender, nostalgic story: Very ‘40s, where little transgressions were forgiven,” said the artistic director, who earlier this year staged the play with real teens at Cal State Northridge. He plans to continue that association in an upcoming “living newspaper” production that he will cast with the college group, the Actors’ Alley company, and the theater’s senior outreach group. And also look for his Shakespeare company (which gets together Sunday mornings for readings at the theater) to stage “Richard III” in February.

Bring your pillows, blankets and picnic baskets to the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, where Jean-Francois Regnard’s “The Heir Transparent” recently opened.

“Regnard was a contemporary of Jean-Baptiste Moliere,” said artistic director Ellen Geer, who is staging the piece. “But Moliere was such a powerful playwright that the others around him drifted away.” Adapted freely by Freyda Thomas, “Heir” is a verse tale about Jerome (Ford Rainey), a wealthy old miser who casts financial gloom over the budding love affairs going on in his household: between his jack-of-all-trades servant and the comic maid Lisette--and the innocent ingenue who never says more than four words and the nephew who trips over every sentence.

“It’s about society and wealth: how money covers up the human loving condition,” Geer said. “Ultimately, love triumphs over money. It’s also very funny, very silly, very sharp. And anybody in the family can come. We even have a sweet dog with a bow on stage.”

CRITICAL CROSS FIRE: Milcha Sanchez-Scott explores rivalry, ritual and the lure of cockfighting in “Roosters,” newly opened at the Los Angeles Theatre Center where Jose Luis Valenzuela directs Pepe Serna, Evelina Fernandez, Lupe Ontiveros, Fausto Bara, Victoria Gallegos and E. J. Castillo.

In The Times, Don Shirley compared the play to the “high-flying bird” it celebrates: “Sanchez-Scott kicks machismo around the stage until it hasn’t a leg to stand on. Her play also flies, in the sense of ascending. Her language leaps from earthbound conversation into flights of poetic fantasy, and her imagery soars--literally so.”

Agreed the Daily News’ Tom Jacobs: “Her strange, wonderful writing style mixes the poetic and the prosaic freely. A beautiful speech full of wonderful imagery is often followed by a cliche or expletive. The language is elevated, then it returns to earth with a thud.”

From the Orange County Register’s Thomas O’Connor: “The play’s symbolism explodes around the father and son’s passion for training fighting cocks, represented in Valenzuela’s staging by a pair of nearly nude human dancers. The strutting, brawling roosters embody Sanchez-Scott’s bitter, angry portrait of Latino men.”

In the Herald-Examiner, Richard Stayton compared it to an earlier LATC entry, Jose Rivera’s “The Promise”: “The second time around dabbling in ‘magical realism,’ Valenzuela directs ambiguously and inertly. A quixotic focus deflates all impact. Individually, some performers are riveting, yet they remain isolated and separate.”

Last, From Polly Warfield in Drama-Logue: “The desert-like Southwest setting and lighting by Timian Alsaker and Douglas D. Smith are broodingly beautiful. The sky becomes another player as it changes from buff to orange to violet to lilac; the big silvery sun moves through it hypnotically.”