‘War Brides’ at International City Theatre; ‘Immigrant’ at La Mirada Civic; ‘The Evangelist’ at Skylight Theatre; ‘Dickens’ at Actors Center

John Iacovelli’s set for “The War Brides,” a three-act work by Terri Wagener, is so resplendent and huge, you wonder if any play can fill it. The first sight of this trilevel cross-section of a women’s boarding house in Montgomery, Ala., circa 1917--complete with a large upstage lobby, a staircase out of Lillian Hellman, a spacious bedroom with a high sun window and a living room to get lost in--sends out two conflicting messages. Either this is a designer showing off, without caring if he harms the play, or the designer doing his job of rendering the play’s meaning in a physical space.

Happily, set and play deserve each other. At the International City Theatre (99 seats, but with a plant capable of Broadway-scale productions), we can imagine the past that Deidre (Patricia Fraser), the boarding house’s matronly boss, so nostalgically and pathetically pines for. The house is the South’s manorial glory days of feudalism, in brick and wood.

But the past is the past. This is the time of the War to End All Wars, which bookish Olivia (Kathryn Aronson) follows avidly. Most of the tenants just want to get their hands on a doughboy before he ships out. Rebecca (Toni Sawyer), Deidre’s friend and toady, asserts her authority: Why not have the boys over for a party?

Big parties, night after night (one reason why Wagener’s play demands a big set). The women, whom we always see in the mornings or afternoons after the nights before, blossom: Young, orphaned Delilah (Amy Resnick) grows intimate with experienced ex-hooker Hattie Potter (Kate Finlayson); Annabelle (Tawny Hamilton) falls in love; and Rebecca enjoys her new primacy. Only the tautly repressed India (Cindy Hanks) remains as before--bitterly cold.

Deidre, on the other hand, withdraws self-pityingly into her bedroom and seems ready to turn off the light and die (Fraser works this transition with a deep reserve of inner resources). But “The War Brides,” brimming with central characters and stories, is about bearing loss and moving on. Deidre does not get her way.

Delilah, in the play’s most resonant surprise, does (which is to seek her mother in New Orleans). But like Olivia’s war, it will disappoint her.

If Wagener’s try at blending literary Southern gothic with poetic naturalism is sometimes undone by too many stories and too many left unresolved (India’s and Hattie’s, most glaringly), it pulses with an unusually nurturing heart. The three-year time span, plus a consistent authorial sense for creating separate and indomitable egos, creates a truthful picture of time passing, minds growing, and legacies reassessed.

Deborah LaVine directs these women with the same spirit of generosity (every actress has her moment) and dramatic rhythm that so distinguished last year’s all-male “Distant Fires.” Resnick draws you toward Delilah’s innocence, and Aronson never uses up Olivia’s comic possibilities. Hanks is hampered by the play’s poorest writing. Finlayson best conveys Hattie’s desires when she doesn’t resort to stock “woman-of-the-world” business.

This is easily one of lighting designer Paulie Jenkins’ greatest achievements, but no less fine are Patricia C. Bercsi’s costumes and Glenn Mehrbach’s sometimes overused waltz-like ragtime music.

‘The Immigrant’

Mark Harelik’s quaint, gentle-humored family biography, “The Immigrant,” is no more and no less than what its subtitle states--”A Hamilton County Album.” In its production at the Mark Taper Forum (Harelik played his immigrant grandfather Haskell, a Jew in Texas), it hardly generated even an album’s evocative aroma.

At the La Mirada Civic Theatre under Glenn Casale’s direction, it is still more a page-turner than a play (“Here’s Haskell with his cart of bananas. Here’s Haskell opening his own store.”) But the emotional core is more substantial than it was at the Taper.

That is, once you get past all the processed Yiddish-meets-Texan comedy. J. David Krassner, who has played this role on the road for a while, hasn’t found an alternative to clowning (neither did Harelik). But as Haskell learns English and American ways, he gracefully balances the man’s double nature of ambition and vulnerability.

Though she arrives late on the scene, Christina Carlisi gives her customarily committed performance as Haskell’s wife, showing her great religious passion and maternal bedrock. Vera Miles and Denver Pyle, as the Hareliks’ good Samaritans, often give the effect that the roles were written for them. They comfortably fit into Ima’s and Milton’s shoes, but they work out in them rather than just stand still.

‘The Evangelist’

Another non-play, but sacrilegious where “The Immigrant” is reverent, is “The Evangelist,” at the Skylight Theatre. Director Frank Doubleday has a lot of fixing to do in the warm-up phase, when a holy-roller band of performers and acolytes of evangelist Crystal Love try to get us ready for the main act. Kenny Chernove’s pianist is a one-note comic and gospel player, and singer Leontine Guillard sends no chills down the spine. TV ministries have a better show sense than this.

Christina Hart’s Crystal (she is also the writer) is a good example of what it means to inhabit a character. Her Crystal knows when to grab a congregation by the lapels, then let it down gently, spinning a tale like a master weaver, singing the transparently false but rhythmic language in her own manner rather than in an impersonation. She’s a female Jimmy Swaggart, but this is an already dusty subject for satire.

A program note states that “Equity Waiver is perhaps the last frontier where artists come together and work on a project exclusively for the love of theater.” This might be true, if “Equity Waiver” existed. If the statement had been in the past tense, it would have made a point. As it is, the makers of “The Evangelist” look as if they haven’t gotten the word.

‘Dickens’

With the current wave of quality radio drama, actor Colin Cox might consider adapting his show for the airwaves. At the Actors Center, his performance as “Dickens,” reading passages from “Oliver Twist” and what seems like the entirety of “A Christmas Carol,” is often aurally engaging but visually dull.

Like Crystal Love in “The Evangelist,” he starts at a podium. Unlike her, he stays there, taking on the voices of various Dickens scoundrels and angels (his Sikes is quite good; his Fagin quite wearying). The light and dark shades of “A Christmas Carol” reveal themselves more fully here than in any movie adaptation, but it’s still little more than an actor reading text. And hearing it in mid-January makes one wonder if the actor knows what month he’s in.