Stage Reviews : ‘North Star’ Doesn’t Shine for Company of Angels

Phoenix-like, Company of Angels has re-emerged from the ashes left by a fire that destroyed its original 29-year-old Hollywood home. Its new Silver Lake location is a far more comfortable abode. A happy story--especially in these lean times for small theater. The unhappy news is the play going on inside, Sanford Clark’s “Looking For The North Star.”

It was perhaps too much to expect that a new physical plant would bring a new aesthetic outlook to Company of Angels. “Looking for the North Star” is one more entry in a long string of mediocre, early draft efforts, usually one-acts dropping a couple of characters into tragicomic circumstances.

The circumstances in this case are for the most part ludicrous, barely comic and only tragic if you can swallow the rest. A dim, somewhat defenseless man named Bobby (author Clark) picks up Sheri (Suanne Spoke), a wanton-looking woman hitchhiking on the highway out of Los Angeles.

The first half of this hour-plus “road play” repeats ad nauseam variations on Sheri manipulating Bobby’s emotions, guilts and weak spots. What’s initially clever (his good Samaritanism is twisted into the act of a lecher, for instance) becomes a belabored and hackneyed dramatizing of an essentially sexist conceit.

To wit: Sheri is the self-admitted hysterical hooker, willing to blow her brains out, thus making us side with Bobby in his attempts to put his foot down. Who does she think she is? Who’s driving this car, anyway?

But this is all a mere ruse to draw us into yet another bad play about . . . AIDS. All we will tell you here is Clark’s clunky foreshadowing method: Bobby, it seems, learned as a young boy that he could put irreversibly injured animals out of their misery. And another thing: “Looking for the North Star” ends in--yes--Death Valley.

This is at best an actors’ exercise, but neither Spoke nor Clark makes it into a workout. Clark has a fix on Bobby’s hangdog personality, but his passivity isn’t made interesting. Contemporary theater is so awash in hooker characters, with so few of distinction (the women in “Etta Jenks” being an exception), that Spoke’s performance threatens to vanish before our eyes even as we’re seeing it. She seems bored with the assignment, perhaps not buying the hysteric cliches even more than we are. To be sure, director Carol Ries has lit no sparks under her cast.

A couple of weeks ago, during a seminar on the future of theater at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, playwright Eduardo Machado told of his futurist nightmare--that the only plays being done were with two characters. It would be nice to see a company on stage at the Company of Angels.

At 2106 Hyperion Ave., Silver Lake, on Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., through April 15. Tickets: $10; (213) 466-1767.