The hand of impersonal regulation held a giant hammer over the House of the Smurfs.

Americans are accustomed to thinking of courtroom dramas as being played out on a stage of polished mahogany and flags, wrapped in the majestic traditions of the law--the black robe, the bailiff’s call for silence, the rigid order of cross-examination and summing up, all stately and formal as a minuet.

But in the catacombs of government there are other tribunals where dramas no less important--at least to the participants--take place, less formal arenas for tax or zoning or business license matters, where citizens desperately try to escape drowning in pools of regulatory quicksand.

One of them sets up shop from time to time in the Van Nuys Woman’s Club on a quiet residential street.

This is where the hand of impersonal regulation held a giant hammer over the House of the Smurfs.

In an auditorium about the size of a rural high school’s, usually empty except for the ghosts of the small-town Valley of another generation, about 30 folding chairs face a battered table in one corner. This is where Jon Perica hears appeals.

Perica, an owlish, scrawny man with a mustache, is an associate zoning administrator for the Department of City Planning. His is a court of the intensely intimate.

Before him come householders and angry neighbors, homeowners facing city orders to make some expensive improvements or tear out ones they already paid for, business owners desperate to erect advertising signs and neighbors who see them as harbingers of a Las Vegas Strip, sex shop owners arguing that the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution specifically to protect the sale of battery-operated erotic devices and moralists demanding that the shop be dynamited and the ground sown with salt.

The small audiences are often on the edge of their chairs, jaws clenched, eyes watering.

There were five people on hand to see Michael Bell, who makes a good living as an actor, give the performance of his life. Perica was the only reviewer that mattered.

Bell and his wife, actress Victoria Carroll, were there to protest what they thought was an unpleasant order: Rip the plumbing from the house where Bell’s 85-year-old mother-in-law lives.

The Bells until recently owned the West End Playhouse on Van Nuys Boulevard, where they sometimes appeared in plays. They pop up here and there on TV. Bell was “the head of some planet” on “Star Trek.” Carroll, semi-retired for three years to care for their daughter, was in shows such as “Hunter” and “Sledge Hammer” before that.

But you’ve heard their voices. Bell is one of the most successful practitioners of an esoteric dramatic art, the cartoon voice.

Saturday morning kiddie shows and commercials have done well by him. Remember the margarine that kept saying “butter”? Whole corporations have earned less than that one.

His is the voice of Major Blood on “GI Joe” and three (Handy, Lazy and Grouchy) of the Smurfs, the little blue elves. Carroll’s voice shows up sometimes as Smurf neighbors, “butterflies, teen-age caterpillars, witches, that sort of thing.”

No challenge to Olivier’s Hamlet perhaps, but that sort of thing allowed Bell and Carroll to buy a house on a 31,300-square-foot lot in Encino about three years ago. The main house was unlivably dilapidated. They lived in one of the two guest houses while shoveling money into refurbishing.

In time they moved into the main house, now a showplace, added a daughter and installed Bell’s mother in one guest house and Victoria’s mother in the other.

“They kind of look like Smurf houses, you know,” Bell commented. “We didn’t realize that until the work was done.”

Life ran along in a cozy family vein until an inspector appeared to look over the main house. Spotting the two guest houses, he wrote up the building code equivalent of a grand jury indictment.

There should be only one guest house, the codes say. To comply with the law, the smaller building at least should be made unusable for habitation by removing the toilet, shower, sink and cooking facilities. Better yet, bulldoze it.

Bell appealed.

“I’m fighting for my life here,” he pleaded.

“It would be a heavy emotional hardship to take away this house from an 85-year-old woman. We didn’t build it. It was there when we bought the place. I have papers that show these things have been there since the 1940s. I have letters from all my neighbors that they don’t mind.”

Perica asked why she couldn’t live in the main house.

“There are no bedrooms on the ground floor. She can’t climb stairs.

“I realize that the law is to prevent people from having rental properties in the back yard, but by the time we’d consider selling it, this place would go for maybe two-million-five. A person who buys something like that, they’re going to rent out a little house in the back?”

Richard Smith, president of the Encino Property Owners Assn., appeared. In passing, he asked the Bells if they wanted to join.

“Depends on what you’re going to say,” Bell replied.

The association “doesn’t want to cause the Bells any problems,” he told Perica, “but neither do we want to see a precedent set. You have a Solomon-like decision to make.”

Perica asked Bell what would happen if his mother-in-law . . . ahhh . . . he searched for a phrase . . . “won the lottery and moved to the south of France?”

“You mean when she dies,” Bell said. “We’d be willing to do whatever’s necessary.”

“Sometimes we must go by the letter of the law in these cases,” Perica said.

Bell’s and Carroll’s faces tightened.

“And sometimes we must go by the spirit.”

He will suspend the order to rip the plumbing out of the home for five years and review it after that. But removing the plumbing won’t be enough, he said. “Another owner could simply put it back.”

Before the Bells can sell the property, they must destroy one of the guest houses.

He did not actually add, “and sow the ground with salt.”