STAGE REVIEW : Dog<i> ex Machina</i> Has Bite in Fascinating ‘Kingfish’

Some plays leave the viewer’s mind the minute the lights come up. Other plays are still there the next morning, working away. Marlane Meyer’s “Kingfish” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center is one of the latter.

It concerns a man with a dog. True, it doesn’t look a dog. But it barks. And--the point of the play--it bites.

Kingfish is the pet and the confidant of an overly precise bachelor of a certain age, wonderfully realized by Buck Henry. (In his strained face, we not only see the man but also his mother.)

Kingfish rolls around on wheels, but he does go yap-yap, and he has a definite personality. Rather a surly one, but it’s a matter of observation that the nicest people can own the nastiest dogs.

Possibly our bachelor isn’t a nice person. It does seem generous of him to take a burned-out hustler (Merritt Butrick) into his household and make him his “son.” But he may have an end in view.

For those who like a play where something happens next, “Kingfish” supplies plenty of conflict and some lovely off-the-wall acting. Sam Anderson wants Butrick to keep living with him . Jacque Lynn Colton and Tony Abatemarco want Henry to be dependent on them .

What follows may remind you of the last play at LATC’s Theatre Two, Pinter’s “The Caretaker.” Again, it’s about allegiances and power games. And the ending, as we say, has real teeth in it.

But what stays in the mind is the question posed by Kingfish. If something displays the properties of X, but behaves like Y, how are we to treat it?

Very carefully these days. The climax of the play comes when someone points out that Kingfish is not, after all, a real dog. This suggests the moment in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” when the child points out that the king is in fact naked, and everybody laughs at the king.

But we have come a long way since “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” If Hitler had marched down the street in similar fashion in 1938, a child who opened his mouth would have found his parent’s hand clapped over it.

One man with a microphone can impose his truth on a nation these days, and it makes sense that director David Schweizer stages “Kingfish” as if Theater Two were a kind of prison, from which actors have been known to escape.

Oddly, this doesn’t violate Schweizer’s official intent to make the play one of those deconstructed theater evenings, where everything is in doubt.

For instance, a stage direction will be read aloud, but not necessarily carried through. “Finney enters in a safari suit.” But we can see that Anderson, the actor playing Finney, is still wearing his gunmetal CIA suit.

Again, chairs and tables are there, but not really there--projections that come and go. In addition, the actors play their scenes face-forward, not relating to each other, and not really relating to us. We are their mirror, their TV camera.

Rather than seeming precious, all this reminds us very much of the late ‘80s. There’s considerable freedom within the frame (Schweizer encourages his actors to be expressive), but the frame itself is very strictly monitored, and nobody is really getting out of line.

Our black-clad narrators on the bridge--director Schweizer and Philip Littell--may encourage us to be skeptical about what we see. But they are also enforcing the play from up there, like border guards. And the actors can’t disappear into the wings: When they come “offstage,” they’re still onstage.

Not that the actors would want to disappear. They enjoy their cage. It would be interesting to know from the designers (Douglas D. Smith, setting; Marianne Schneller, lighting; Susan Nininger, costumes) if this was the intended metaphor--technology as the ultimate arbiter of who I am, where it’s OK for me to stand, whose truth I will march to.

A fascinating play, in any case, this shaggy dog story. And a brilliant production.

Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Closes Oct. 23. Tickets $22-$25. 514 S. Spring St. (213) 627-5599.

‘KINGFISH’

Marlane Meyer’s play, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Director David Schweizer. Producer Diane White. Set Douglas D. Smith. Lighting Marianne Schneller. Costumes Susan Nininger. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Music composed by Steve Moshier. Projections designed by Bradford Fowler and Douglas D. Smith. Stage manager Pericles Rellas. With Tony Abatemarco, Sam Anderson, Merritt Butrick, Jacque Lynn Colton, Buck Henry, Philip Littell.