STAGE REVIEW : Padua Hills Comes to Design Center

What a difference a site makes.

The Bedouin-like Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival, traveling from such university environs as Cal Arts to last year’s home at the Boyd Street Theatre, is once again outdoors (as it was originally conceived 11 summers ago in the haunting foothills below Mt. Baldy). The place this time is the cavernous courtyard of the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.

The festival is primarily about providing a safe workshop for veteran and new playwrights, but priority No. 2 is finding the right place to present the plays once they’re ready for the public. The Padua buzzword for this is site-specific. In most of its past, Padua-goers trodded through (or at least saw the one-act plays in) meadows, brushland, hillocks--any place but a theater.

The closest we get to nature at the new home is a landscaped hill where a woman (Ellen Blake) gets her hands dirty searching for a possession in Susan Champagne’s “A Good Touch.” But the boyfriend of Emily (Molly Cleator), who befriends Blake, goes off on an errand to Santa Monica Blvd.--only a block away.

If not all the pieces are urban-based--David Schweizer’s “The Ballad of the Sleepy Heart” takes place in the never-never land of a fairy tale--they seem to be aware that they’re as far from the Padua Hills as you can get.

For that matter, Schweizer’s “Ballad” is very relevant to the community it’s in, for his play with music is an AIDS fable about a prince who must learn to live without an endless stream of bed partners and still enjoy life. This work, the evening’s most ambitious, represents a genuine expansion of themes and styles for Padua.

So do the three works-in-progress, interspersed through the program: Rex Weiner’s “Mendoza,” about torturers in a Latin American country; Paul Hidalgo-Durand’s “Esperanza,” a view of two Latino sisters growing up; and Lynn Montgomery’s “Like a Shadow Singing,” in which a woman refugee from south of the border makes an unlikely alliance with a street-wise L.A. kid. All of them are by and/or about Latinos and the cross-cultural flux between borders. Quite a change from the old Padua and its sometimes hyper-self-conscious work from mostly white, New York writers.

So, a new Padua, but still a mixed bag--as it should be, given its developmental nature. Maria Irene Fornes’ “Drowning” is a pleasantly miniaturist piece about a man (Don Keith Opper) who discovers the power of newspapers and of love. Roxanne Rogers directs Opper and friends Jon C. Slade and Chuck McQuary toward the soft, bemused tones of Chekhov (Fornes based the piece on a Chekhov short story), but they still project through Stephanie K. Schwartz’s very accomplished and amusing full-face masks and costumes.

Love seems to be the operative word at a festival that used to dramatize states of anomie . Champagne’s “Good Touch,” though marred by some unlikely plotting (why is Ellen Blake’s hotshot agent sister spending precious time she says she doesn’t have tracking Blake down?), is very much about forms of love and communication. Patricia Mattick’s agent finds new satirical angles on a now-familiar target of playwright skewering, and Cleator and Blake convince as decent, complex women. If Padua is about letting playwrights grow, it’s good ground for Champagne.

Martin Epstein, an erratic writer, offers a multidimensional portrait of a widow in “Vera.” Kathleen Kramer comes dangerously close to pushing Vera into the land of the babbling old hag, and director Epstein cannot completely sustain the long, three-scene character study. But it remains an act of the imagination to get inside the head of someone so different from the playwright, and explore the tragic loss of one’s lifelong love.

Speaking of babbling, John O’Keefe’s “Babbler” is the evening’s one case of direction (Jan Munroe) far surpassing the writing. O’Keefe’s theater of Dada-esque poetics consumed in violence tends to fall into extremes of success or failure. This time, it’s the latter; but with Tina Preston’s verbose Old Woman and Scott Paulin and Joe Kane as clownish, murderous henchmen, this is a fine, sinister staging, aided immeasurably by Steven T. Howell’s lights.

Howell’s lights help Schweizer’s “Ballad” (some of the lights are on human-powered mobile tripods, which are amazingly unobtrusive). But only a major rewrite, and re-thinking, can save this “fairy-tale song cycle.” The experiment here is to mix the elements of fable drama (a gay prince surrounded by AIDS victims) and pop music (The Society Boys nicely blend influences from Sting, Talking Heads and Carla Bley). Philip Littell, a hammy performer and weak vocalist, is often going in one direction, and the play in another. The AIDS dilemma, even mythologized, may resist musicalization.

Plays at 8687 Melrose Ave. on Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., until July 31. Tickets: $15; (213) 466-1767.