STAGE : Stop Calling Them Little Theaters

A phrase that people ought to stop using in regard to our smaller houses (the Odyssey, the Back Alley, the Victory, etc.) is little theater.

It’s literally correct. These houses all seat 99 people or fewer. But that doesn’t make them little theater.

Little theater is amateur night. Or rather, it used to be. It’s what used to happen when the wife of the richest man in town decided that it would be fun to get up an acting group, possibly built around her.

One remembers a St. Paul production of “Come Blow Your Horn” where the foundress of the company decided that Neil Simon’s last scene really wasn’t very funny and substituted one of her own devising. Why not? It was her theater.

Little theater is wobbly sets and actors who can’t remember their lines, all the disasters caught by George Kelly in “The Torchbearers” 60 years ago. The term for the Odyssey and its counterparts at the end of the 1980s is smaller theater .

Or even just theater. Because it doesn’t differ, or shouldn’t, from what we get downtown. Even when the show disappoints, the context is professional. Standards are being met. Nobody is dabbling.

Only the scale of the show is smaller, and that’s usually an advantage. In a small house, the actor can leave some things unsaid, trusting the spectator to read the fine print by himself.

Smaller theater also offers lower ticket prices than downtown theater (although not that much lower: $10 is about the bottom line) and it’s usually possible to park on the street. Going to the Odyssey or the Matrix is more casual than schlepping to the Music Center or the Shubert; more like going to a neighborhood movie. If the show is lousy, you can slip out at intermission without feeling that you’ve blown the evening.

And it often is lousy. As with the larger theaters, one has to pick and choose. Calendar’s “Critic’s Choice” listings (Page 46) can give the reader some direction there. They almost always include shows from the smaller-theater sector.

I recently caught up with three recommended shows, and can recommend the recommendations. Each engages you while you are there and can bear being thought about in the morning--the test of a real theatrical experience, as distinct from a mere show of firepower.

Jude Narita’s “Coming Into Passion/Song for a Sansei” only lasts an hour or so at the Fountain Theatre, but it’s the fullest hour since Martha Clarke’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” We measure time in the theater by the amount of information received, and Narita’s show is packed with it.

She wrote it herself, for herself. A cynic would call it a classic example of showcase theater, designed to call attention to the number of different roles that a performer can play.

Why is this a bad thing? Not only does Narita provide information about her range as an actress, she provides information about the women she is playing. And these women deserve to be looked at.

Usually that’s all we do with some of her women--look at them. Take the ever-smiling Saigon bar girl who keeps chattering about what a good job she’s got, compared with some of the girls on the street. This person’s function in society is to be used and disposed of, but nobody told her that. She thinks she has a future, and the funny thing is, she may be right.

Compare Narita’s gentle Philippine woman, auditioning via videotape for a husband whom she will love, honor and, yes, definitely, obey. What if he sometimes gets angry with you and hits you? She tries to process this question and cannot. Why would he do that? It’s the first scene in a story that we don’t need to see played out.

Her saddest tale is a child’s version of the Hiroshima explosion, told as if the bomb were a little boy (its nickname was Fat Boy) who wanted to be friends. The gentleness of the telling is what hurts.

Narita also gives us a gallery of Asian-American woman, some of whom hold their own counsel and some of whom speak out for what’s right. She respects the strength in both approaches. What she doesn’t respect is the woman who says, “This has nothing to do with me.” One can’t leave her show with that attitude. Her characters follow you home.

“El Salvador” at the Gnu Theatre is, on one level, “The Front Page” transposed to Central America. A group of grungy American TV correspondents sit around a hotel room in San Salvador getting juiced and waiting for something to happen that will interest New York.

Playwright Rafael Lima obviously has done time in such a room. He sees the humor here, sometimes descending to that of “Animal House,” and he sees the nihilism. His characters couldn’t care less about the rightness or the wrongness of the war. Are you kidding? They’re here to get film on the war--and they aren’t above faking it.

A dirty job, but, hey, somebody’s got to do it. Lima’s subject is how men can get used to such dirty jobs, and can even get to like them. One is relieved of the need to think and the temptation to care. It’s the high of pure function.

When “El Salvador” talks about this stuff, it gets a little preachy. Mostly it doesn’t talk about it. Lima puts his characters through a “normal” day at the El Dorado Americana--including a power failure and an earthquake--and lets us draw our own conclusions about the absurdity of war and of big-ticket TV news.

Director Jeff Seymour likewise seems to have approached the play by finding just the actors he wanted and telling them to go for it. If Lima’s characters seem a little schematic in the writing, that’s not the effect with actors like Carmen Argenziano to play the older man with the bad marriage; Drew Pillsbury to play the new boy from New York, and James Morrison to play the mercenary who is starting to enjoy playing with skulls.

A gross group; a disturbingly enjoyable play.

One of the Odyssey’s biggest hits was “The Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” and its new show, “McCarthy,” is another courtroom epic.

Playwright Jeff Richards wants us to see the inner voyage of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (Victor Brandt), but he is more successful in tracing the ironic thrust of McCarthy’s public career.

We first see him as a young legislator looking for an issue. He more or less falls into the business of investigating Communists--a sexier cause by far than veterans housing. Then he starts believing his own speeches. By the end, he has gone absolutely over the top, an easy prey for C. Thomas Cunliffe’s polished Joseph Welch. “Little did I dream, Senator . . .”

The committee hearings are superbly rendered by director Frank Condon, every bit as gripping at the Odyssey as in the film “Point of Order.” We can feel the tide turn when Joe goes that one step too far; and Brandt’s McCarthy can feel it too.

The one mistake here is to have McCarthy brandish a whiskey bottle at the committee. If alcoholism is to be an issue in the play, Brandt doesn’t need a prop to suggest it. (He pegs McCarthy without once imitating him, the mark of a very smart actor.)

On the other hand, the business about the late Roy Cohn’s homosexuality is played with the proper lightness, leaving us free to see that as an issue in the play or not. (Ralph Seymour is superb as Cohn, a ferret whom you somehow can’t help liking.)

As with “El Salvador” the more this play tells us what to think, the less we believe it. But when it goes on the record about McCarthy and his era, it comes to roaring life. Small theaters can tell big stories.