STAGE REVIEW : Joe Frank Sets Radio Voice, Vision on Stage

Joe Frank is on to something.

It isn’t his half-earnest, half-mocking voice, the perfect radio sound taken just a little too far. Nor is it his sneaky way of lampooning urban paranoia while at the same time celebrating it. It isn’t even the anti-narrative thrill Frank shares with his audience, the excitement he quietly conveys of inventing some kind of new fictional form.

All these apply to his radio work, titled “Joe Frank: Work in Progress,” which has aired on KCRW-FM for the past three years. They also apply to his new theater piece at MOCA, “Joe Frank: In Performance.” But by taking his show to the stage, Frank’s ingeniousness has become clearer. Which isn’t to say that the mysteriousness of his world, an odd mixture of Borges, Donald Fagen and intellectual soap opera, has been dissipated.

Frank, it turns out, has all the good instincts of a playwright, yet his new work is no more a “play” than his KCRW pieces are “radio drama.” Like his radio work, “In Performance” questions the premises of the medium he happens to find himself in. The way Frank tests things is by beginning with familiar words and images, then finding the underlying strangeness. This is not unlike how Ibsen or Beckett have operated. Theater is the home for the surprise merchant, and Frank fits right in.

He does because if there is one unifying notion in Frank’s various monologues, duologues, streams of consciousness and pseudo-documentaries, it’s that life is forever surprising. This is set with the opening piece, which has “Joe” dealing with his insomnia by watching the cable sex channel. He takes the channel up on its offer to dial up its 976 number and get the woman of his dreams.

So far, so familiar. Then Frank starts throwing big hooks into the fire. Such as Joe demanding his dream woman fulfill a list of outrageous qualifications (like Henry Miller, Frank is a great writer of lists). The woman arrives, and she isn’t at all what he requested. We are told that she has “the odor of infants’ nurseries,” which could be either good or bad. It turns out to be so good, he proposes to her. They marry in two days. And we’re not even 10 minutes into the show.

Throughout the rest of the evening are references to the marriage, as if it’s in a test tube that Dr. Frank checks in on from time to time. Now, the surprise isn’t how the connubial bonds have suffered--with Frank, everything eventually suffers--but how completely, unthinkably they’ve suffered. It’s a life painted in wildly hyperbolic tones, and you begin to see that Frank’s deepest source is the great master of tall, dark fiction, Ambrose Bierce. The connection wasn’t made when hearing only Frank’s voice. Now, as he reads written words on stage, the literary lineage is dramatic.

As the title implies, “In Performance” isn’t just Frank sitting before a mike. Like the initial familiarity of his tales, he starts that way. Close your eyes, and the amplified voice with the background mood music (lots of Jon Hassell, Giovanni Venosta and Roberto Musci) puts you in radioland.

The stage, outfitted with dry wit by Marina Levikova-Neyman’s set design and Jason Berliner’s lights, begins to assert itself. Frank puts himself on the couch, and we’re in a psychiatrist’s office. He stands by a water cooler, and we’re in the corporate war zone. He takes his confessional monologues right into the audience, always addressing the women in the crowd (Frank’s metier is heterosexual fundamentalism). He stands against a wall, next to a palm tree’s shadow, and it’s either a vacation spot or a tropical Third World nightmare.

Because the pieces here are based on radio programs Frank created with his collaborators David Rapkin and Arthur Miller ( not the author of “Death of a Salesman”), what has been achieved is a visualization of them with the sparest theatrical devices. Besides the sense of surprise, Frank also has the playwright’s knack for getting in and out of a scene without losing a scene’s internal dramatic logic.

The entirety lacks that logic, partly because it feels like a sampler of various pieces. A weekly radio segment by Frank, though typically open-ended, is also typically satisfying, because it works out a theme. “In Performance” is so replete with bits of themes that it nearly becomes themeless, the dark side of Frank’s weakness for eclecticism.

There could be worse weaknesses. The important news is that theater is seen as a thriving option for a writer who refuses to be hemmed in by the printed page, who is obsessed with pushing his words into the third dimension while keenly exploring the fifth.

At 250 S. Grand Ave., on Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., through June 3 (dark May 5-6). Tickets: $12; (213) 626-6828.