STAGE REVIEW : The Taste of Intoxicating ‘Demon Wine’

Playwright Thomas Babe was recently quoted saying that his reason for writing “is to be larger or different than life” and that his play “Demon Wine,” which opened over the weekend at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, is about “an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation who ends up someplace he didn’t intend to be.”

The temptation to quote Babe comes from two factors: Like most good playwrights, he uses the stage as a distortional mirror instead of a camera, and “Demon Wine” (like Babe’s “Father and Sons” before it) eludes classification--perhaps the surest manifestation of its success. It can be seen as a comic satire or a satirical tragedy, with much the same results. What’s constant under Babe’s stylish obliqueness is the clear-eyed sobriety of his intent.

Thus, on the face of it, “Demon Wine” is the relatively simple tale of a relatively simple parts salesman named Jimmie (Bill Pullman) who loved selling parts, but whose job has been “extirpated,” leaving him high if not exactly dry. While drowning his perplexity in his bourbon, he’s offered another job by his friend Curly (Tom Waits), who suggests that Jimmie may want to consider working for his father, Vinnie (Philip Baker Hall).

Jimmie doesn’t, but he agrees to meet the guy. Curly’s father is a mobster who sucks the reluctant Jimmie into the vortex of criminal life. The rest is the stuff of which B movies are made. But this is an A play and if the characters are stock characters, it’s to make a point.

There’s a whole raft of villains and victims here. Among the villains are Vinnie’s synchronized bodyguards (Delbert Highlands and Kevin Symons in matching gestures and pin stripes), a paunchy bungler named Fast Mail (Jan Munroe) but who is definitely third class, Vinnie’s moll (a languid Carol Kane), and, of course, Curly, who’s not very good at villainy and gets demoted to victim down the line.

The other victim--aside from the conflicted Jimmie--is the hapless Bill (Bud Cort), an old friend of Jimmie’s who dropped out, lives in a box and prefers to be known as Buffalo. Bill owes Vinnie money that Jimmie’s sent to collect. That’s where the trouble starts.

But trite events delivered in high (sometimes cartoonish) style and skewered by offbeat, often poetic dialogue serve a distinctive purpose: to make us think about morality--not the garden variety stuff droned from the pulpit, but that which must be lived on a daily basis within the confines of individual choice and responsibility.

A mouthful, yes, but clear when you eventually realize that Jimmie is Everyman, buffeted by good and evil and trying to live up to the voice of conscience, which, in this play, comes out of the unvarnished mouth of Jimmie’s 12-year-old daughter, Wanda, who loves to fish and is always hooking on to painful and embarrassing truths (Vanessa Marquez in a touching, tomboyish performance). Her capacity for candor is reminiscent of the child in “When We Were Very Young,” a dance piece with dialogue that Babe developed for Twyla Tharp.

Babe is good at wrapping his medium around his message, creating a real entertainment whose layers must be unpeeled if one is to find its heart. In this passion for disguise, he has had fine support from director David Schweizer, who keeps intentional comedy at a minimum, preferring to let the slyness emerge slowly, in the occasional skip of Vinnie’s matched bodyguards as they move scenery around or in the offstage noises that accompany action, such as the sound of bodies, dead or alive, dropping into the river. (Jon Gottlieb did the sound with his usual expertise.)

One could wish for a little more speed here and there (the performance runs about two-and-a-half hours), but the show resists it. There’s an aura of deliberate composure that won’t be pushed.

Playing into Schweizer’s hand are Susan Nininger’s slightly exaggerated costumes and Timian Alsaker’s tongue-in-cheek set--a seemingly bare stage with side entrances and a high gray canvas backing. Except that patches of the canvas peel off at convenient times in convenient rectangles, revealing a multipurpose structure that can be a bridge, a hotel, a jail, as the scenes dictate. Props descend, hang, glide, roll on, get raised, kicked or carried off. Everything is smooth and kept to a minimum that Marianne Schneller’s lights and shadows love to cajole or attack.

The result is a sharp-looking show whose content is less accessible than it seems. Babe is a man of direct thoughts indirectly conveyed. His plays relish making you work at unmasking them--an acquired taste, in other words. And, like most acquired tastes, well worth acquiring.

At the Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2, until March 19. Tickets: $22-$25; (213) 627-5599.