STAGE REVIEW : Hollyweird Shines in ‘Hurlyburly’

No wonder it has taken four years for David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” to come to Los Angeles.

It’s not so much a matter of bringing coals to Newcastle (to use just the sort of cliches in which Rabe’s characters love to indulge) as it is one of holding a nasty mirror up to nature at its most denatured.

Is anyone in Hollywood ready for this? We’ll see. It takes stamina to watch Rabe’s unnerving, accurate, exasperating, rambling expose of Hollyweird at its worst. Sitting through the “Hurlyburly” that opened Tuesday at the Westwood Playhouse is a true test of one’s endurance. On the other hand, Rabe, who also directed his play, delivers a striking production which, in one more of its seemingly endless ironies, is highlighted by a powerful performance from--of all people--a high-visibility movie star: Sean Penn.

How sweet and sour it is.

But Penn, who provides many of the evening’s most delicious moments with a unique capacity for the unbroken monodrone (or rambling on about nothing on one vocal level) is not alone in giving the play its high calibration. Danny Aiello shares the spotlight as Phil, a violent, tragically funny ex-con with pretensions to talent. The two are strongly supported by Michael Lerner as screenwriter Artie, who comes in a close third at claiming our benumbed attention.

Not an easy thing to do in a play that takes on the nearly impossible task of lashing out at a certain petty social group by showing us how boring--and deadly--its depravity can be. Rabe succeeds on the page, if not always on the stage. It takes special skill to create bores without being one.

Penn plays neurotic Eddie, a cocaine-snorting, vodka-swilling small-time casting director who shares a Hollywood Hills home with a fellow casting director named Mickey (Hollywood denizens have no surnames). Mickey (Scott Plank) is more together than Eddie, a sort of blank anchorman type who succeeds in temporarily stealing away Eddie’s girl-friend Darlene (Belinda Bauer).

No big deal. This is a world of easy trade-offs. Eddie, divorced with a couple of kids (most of these guys are divorced with a couple of kids), has only just met Darlene anyway, but imagines himself in love, as he imagines nearly everything else. His favorite pastime, when not snorting or drinking, is pontificating on the living-room couch.

“Hurlyburly” (how ironic the title) is a play about stasis. Almost nothing happens beyond the continuous ebb and flow of the house’s habitues : Phil (in the throes of breaking up with his wife), Artie, Mickey and their assorted pick-ups--Darlene, Bonnie (Mare Winningham) and teen-age Donna, a reject of the Midwest who has attached herself first to Phil and then to this entire benighted household. Easy come, easy go, easy ups, easy downs, with the women as benighted in their own way as the men are in theirs.

Rabe’s portraiture is exquisitely sardonic, his writing biting at worst, brilliant at best, even when it’s going around in circles, as it is most of the time. His fury at the movie business’ reign of mediocrity is explicit. But the play is ultimately damaged, if not entirely scuttled, by its own bewildering length (2 1/2 hours of talk, talk, talk, interrupted by two intermissions).

While David Mamet’s more recent “Speed-the-Plow” takes satirical potshots at the same corrupted scene, Rabe is in it for the kill. “Hurlyburly” draws real blood. In its three meandering, repetitious acts, it delivers dead-on platitudes punctuated by such apt philosophical droppings as “bla bla bla” and is rampant with enough four-letter words to turn Mamet green.

Except for Bauer’s vocal mushiness as Darlene (she needs to speak out more, as well as up), and a rather tame version of the battered Bonnie in Winningham’s engaging portrayal (we are less aware here of how badly she has allowed men to treat her--a choice made at some cost to the play), the production is striking on every level and, yes, even brisk.

Penn and Aiello are indelible, with Aiello exceptional at conveying the tragic paradox in Phil: the sheer dread force of subtextual violence hiding under a pathetic veneer of laughability.

Richard Meyer’s set and lighting (every cheap canyon townhouse you’ve ever been in) and Marianna Elliott’s telling costumes are solid accomplices in the recitation of this ugly story of decadence in low places.

It’s a story that does need to be told, but can’t it be done in less than 25 million words?

At 10886 LeConte Ave . in Westwood, Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2. Until Jan. 22. Tickets: $26-$32.50; (213) 208-5454.