‘Eden Court’ at Tamarind; ‘Absurdist Plays’ at Theatre of N.O.T.E.; ‘Gravity’ at City Dance; ‘Pepper Street’ at the Venture; ‘Sound of Soul’ by South Korean Group

The Humana Festival of New American Plays at Louisville’s Actors Theatre has gained a reputation as a consistent showcase for literate but safe plays. A “Humana” kind of play is often set in the South, with one or more women as central characters, naturalistic, funny but serious. On its way to the Tamarind Theatre, Murphy Guyer’s “Eden Court” hit Louisville (and, in 1986, Long Beach’s International City Theatre). It fits the Humana formula like a snug glove.

Bonnie and Schroeder (Deborah Scott and Scott Allan Campbell) are a young couple who already seem to be in marriage’s middle age of quiet disgust. She has decked out their trailer home with Elvis bric-a-brac, and he views the arrival of his 30th birthday with dread. At first, our sympathies are all with Bonnie, as Schroeder appears to be a merciless bully.

The play’s nice touch is how those sympathies shift when Schroeder comes home from work. His reluctance to have a baby isn’t stubbornness; it’s based on reason born of forward-looking ambition. That ambition is as silly as Bonnie’s taste in home decor, and a certain golden mean is finally struck between the pair.

Nice, but it makes for a very clean play of very sloppy lives. Just when it’s starting to get interesting with Schroeder, Guyer flees to a facile resolution rather than making tough dramaturgical choices.

Director Robert Spera accents domestic moments with a comic touch that’s never insistent, and his cast is the same way. Scott avoids turning Bonnie into the cliched flubbing housewife, just as Campbell magnifies a portrait in frustration. Dave Florek’s Carl nicely embodies a stupid self-confidence, and Stephanie Shroyer’s Barb hints of a woman who’s lost track of her innate wisdom.

Michael Killen’s sound design is full of very appropriate Elvis tunes, but Barry Frost’s trailer design requires the audience in the left rows--whose stage side is a trailer wall--to look to their right for the stage action.

At 5919 Franklin Ave., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Tickets: $15; (818) 761-5368.

‘Absurdist Plays and Children’s Stories’

It was Jean Tardieu, not Eugene Ionesco, who produced the first consciously absurdist theater work--”Courtesy Doesn’t Pay,” in 1947. He later wrote “The Information Office,” and both of them come out of a postwar European sensibility that saw the world as going to the dogs with totalitarianism waiting in the wings.

At Theatre of N.O.T.E. (now sharing the Friends and Artists Theatre space), these Tardieu pieces have been grouped with four Ionesco playlets about a curious nuclear family under the title, “Absurdist Plays and Children’s Stories.” There’s a certain historical interest in seeing them staged, but the program only justifies why we’ve forgotten Tardieu and remembered Ionesco.

In “Courtesy,” a professorial pervert is put in his place by a sinister “visitor,” whose last gesture is to wave goodby to us with the fascist salute. In “Information,” a man tries to get some help with train schedules, but he really needs help scheduling his life. The existential symbolism in both becomes a very hard cross to bear for the actors, who have been directed to overact by R.S. Bailey.

Although the final resolution of the four “Children’s Stories” (interspersed through the evening) is predictably nightmarish and crudely Freudian, the stories are enriched with the light and dark tones of a fairy tale. Ionesco’s joke is on himself: he speculates on how an imaginative, story-telling father might make his little daughter go mad. Director Joseph Megel makes the stage a kind of dream state, but with a child’s sense of make-believe. The entire cast deserves mention: Linda Quiroz as the little girl, Joyce Mancini, Debora Roventini, Jim Pirri, and Robert Rigamonti as the parents and narrators, and Lamar Aguilar as the maid.

At 1761 N. Vermont Ave., Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m., through May 11. Tickets: $12.50; (213) 664-0689.

‘Gravity’ Don’t lend much weight to “Gravity,” an urban revue at the performance space, City Dance. Writer/director/composer Stuart K Robinson’s message is that city life gets you down, but at least we’re in it together.

That’s about the level at which his own songs work--as self-knowing cliches (Rickie Lee Jones’ tunes, used extensively, save the show). He uses the gravity metaphor for relationships, but what’s really meant is magnetism. In a show that has homeless women (sounding suspiciously like Lily Tomlin) dancing with sleek hipsters, anything goes.

Thus, “Gravity” is a grab-bag of comedy skits and dance routines, full of morsels on female frustrations, drugs, show-biz snakes and bad dating. It works best as a showcase for its young performers, who can play for laughs and dance in a slick commercial style. “Gravity” is full of pop terpsichorean heat that’s ultimately vaporous.

At 2855 S. Robertson Blvd., Saturday and Sunday, 8 p.m. Ends Sunday. Tickets: $10; (213) 558-0917.

‘Pepper Street’ “Pepper Street,” a truly poor musical drowning in greeting-card sentiments, is the most inexplicable success in local theater. Filling seats at the Venture Theatre for more than four years (with a brief detour to the Backlot Cabaret), this show by Toni Bull Bua (lyrics and book) and Gene Bua (music) has fans ranging from Mayor Tom Bradley--he recently declared a “Pepper Street Day” in Los Angeles--to a young woman who sat next to me last weekend. She claimed to have seen it seven times.

Seeing it once (at three hours, no less) was quite enough, thank you. The only interest was in seeing how the new actress fared in the lead role of Spirit, the teen suicide victim. She is rising pop star Martika, who has a good throaty voice for the music but confuses posing with acting--as the show confuses pamphleteering with entertaining.

At 3435 W. Magnolia Ave., Burbank, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $15; (818) 842-8384.

‘The Sound of Soul’

The age-old theatrical values of giving human meaning to sound were thick in the air while listening to “The Sound of Soul,” a solemn production by South Korea’s Chung-Eum Theater of the Deaf. At the company’s one-night performance at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre last Saturday (part of a six-city American premiere tour), modern stage conventions strained to keep up with the old traditions.

Indeed, the play itself, adapted by Kim Wan from a Buddhist tale, sometimes paled next to the extraordinary theatrics of the evening’s first half of dance performances. In these pieces, led by music directors Cho Sae-Il and Yoon Hee-Sun on drums, pure choreography was less important than the blending of percussive dynamics with group patterns (such as in the “Fan Dance”) or the concept of a collective drum sound.

The effect of “Drum Dance” was mesmerizing, the aural equivalent of metaphysics. You were so mesmerized that you forgot that the performers were deaf--which was precisely the point.

“The Sound of Soul” was not so hypnotic. The tale hinges on a sacrifice: Only an innocent child, dropped into the molten metal for a bell casting, can make the bell ring with a sound so pure that it will compel the villagers to pray for peace. The path to peace, then, is a tortuous one; Kim Chung-Ill’s priest and Kim Young-Min’s mother, with few spoken words, physically emoted in a high tragic style.

To the Western viewer, the instant connection was with Sophocles and the Greek tragedies--the conflict between religion and the heart, the marriage of ritual and storytelling, the death of youth.

But the Western viewer was also at a disadvantage. For instance, the show’s program, with explanatory information, is in Korean (a helpful production assistant provided this reviewer with a synopsis).

Other problems, not lost in translation, emerged. Lee Kwang Seub’s set design is made for long-distance transport, but not for visual elegance. Kim Jong Hyun’s lights cast some striking color patterns, but his sound recording utterly lacked the power of the on-stage acoustic instruments.