STAGE REVIEW : ‘Brain Death’: An Uneven Roll in the Trash

Any show that advertises itself as sticking “its inquiring nose in the dumpsters of contemporary culture” and then taking “a good-natured roll in the trash” can’t be all bad. You know at least that it won’t be pretentious. But what will it be instead?

Disappointing. “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know,” a visiting revue at the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Theatre 4, takes a look behind those gory or absurd supermarket tabloid headlines and comes up with uneven material.

This revue with music, song, minimal dancing, jokes and one-liners takes aim at the rootlessness of life the ‘80s in a world that sports a new creed for each day of the week and a how-to book to go with it (“The one I believe most is the one I read last”). It’s predictably raucous, usually funny, but too often skims along, forcefully stirring up the dead air of deja vu and deja entendu. (Too forcefully.)

The piece was devised by six women, clearly from their own experiences, and parts of it have that unmistakable ring of truth. Three of the six--Rosanna E. Coppedge, Valerie Fagan and Gwen Wafer--are in this company, which is co-directed by Mark Houston (who did the music and lyrics and has guided this show from the start) and Sam Woodhouse, artistic director of the San Diego Rep, where another company of “Six Women” is into its 17th month.

This Los Angeles incarnation, however, isn’t quite in place. A great deal of energy and good will is expended by Coppedge, Fagan, Wafer and their current companions: Mary Bond Davis, Michelle Callahan and Cathy Susan Pyles. But too often they look as if they’re working at having fun rather than having fun as they work.

In full Melrose Avenue regalia (Silvia Jahnsons did the costumes and props), the women bemoan the collapse of culture (“Someone lied and I bought the whole dream”), provide a contest of wills between a TV daytime soap star and a disputatious fan, ask the question “Is there anything better than sex with the man you love?” with assorted replies (the mildest being “Double Coupons”), and conclude, by an intricate system of latter-day reasoning, that Khalil Gibran is “some sort of Lebanese Rod McKuen.”

Nothing wildly original here, but the targets are apt even if the attacks are not always on target. “Six Women” oscillates between predictable trash and cliche scenarios, rarely rising above collegiate humor even at its best.

It’s at its best in a hilarious lampoon of Barbie and Ken, a prom queen number wherein Coppedge admits “I was much too fat to be a prom queen,” to the choral do-wop backup of her five classmates, a funny ha-ha sequence with a talking/singing severed head (Coppedge and Pyles), and a number on getting away from it all that cleverly involves the use of tires and flashlights.

“Six Women” is stronger in the second act (highlighted by a satirical number about suicidal poodles in Detroit), perhaps because by then it has built up a head of steam. But it’s still relative and the finale--a combined spoof of UFO sightings and television ministries--is overdone and anticlimactic.

Houston’s music is unremarkable, his lyrics don’t go much beyond “Do you think you understand this song? / If you do then you’re sick and you’re wrong.” Nor is the show completely comfortable with the tightness of the quarters in Theatre 4. Toni Kaye’s staging of the musical numbers reflects this discomfort. Clifton R. Welch’s set is too busy for the snug space, with Douglas D. Smith’s manically dancing lights only adding to the confusion. Nan O’Byrne and Utah Ground produced.

At 514 S. Spring St., Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2, until April 16. Tickets: $22. (213) 627-5599.