A New Spin on L.A. From the Groundlings

The Groundlings are back in an all-new revue, “The Groundlings’ Big Spin,” which opened last weekend at the company’s theater in West Hollywood Theatre. “The general theme of the show relates to Southern California living,” said Bill Schreiner, who took over the director’s reins last March. “The lottery is a big part of that. So when the audience comes in, we have a Big Wheel spin.”

Alas, don’t count on cash prizes.

“You’re not going to leave richer coming to the Groundlings--but you will leave happier,” said Schreiner (who reprised his direction of the local stage hit “Just Like the Pom Pom Girls” in the recent film “The Sinful Life”). Prizes, which are handed out during the “Big Spin” segment, include becoming an honorary Groundling “forever,” a Groundlings T-shirt (“which marks the person for the evening”) and a package of Lee Press-On Nails. “Men,” the director noted, “seem to enjoy that especially.”

The show was inspired, in part, as a response to what Schreiner calls “the other comedy group that’s moved in”--Second City. “They’re the new guys,” he said. “They have to prove themselves. We’ve been here 15 years. So we’re trying to stress the home team. We’re observers of the L.A. scene, what’s unique to this area. So more or less, the material now relates to the West Coast experience.”

Other sketches include “Chair” (about a Melrose furniture store so trendy it discourages actual sales), a takeoff on “The Love Connection,” “The Ladies of Dupar’s” and “The Road Less Traveled,” which finds two couples talking about the best routes to get through town--”very hysterical,” said Schreiner. “And very L.A.”

ROOM FOR RENT: Cultures collide in Lillian Hara and Dorie Rush Taylor’s “Vacancy,” opening this week at East West Players. Norman Cohen (“A Woman of Independent Means”) directs.

“It’s taken from Diane Johnson’s story, ‘An Apple, An Orange’--about two immigrant women,” said actress Beulah Quo. “Rosie, the Dutch woman, rents a room to the Chinese woman, Anna. Although there’s some humor, it’s pretty serious stuff. The women discover their different value systems and cultural habits trying to live together. In their need for friendship and bonding, they try to cut across those differences. But they fail.”

Her attraction to the role?

“There are so few stories anywhere about middle-aged women approaching being senior citizens,” said the actress, who’s one of the founding members of East West.

“This play gives you so much to put your teeth into.” Unlike television? “TV gives us short little scenes,” conceded the actress, who’s played a housekeeper on ABC’s “General Hospital” since 1985. “But I’m not complaining. I love doing the show. And now I even have my own fan club.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Beth Henley’s “Abundance,” on the adventures of two mail-order brides and their prospective husbands in the 1800s, is having its premiere at South Coast Repertory. Ron Lagomarsino directs O-Lan Jones, Belita Moreno, Jimmie Ray Weeks, Bruce Wright and John Walcutt.

Said The Times’ Sylvie Drake: “Minor bleeps notwithstanding, ‘Abundance’ remains Henley’s most thoughtful and accomplished, if not necessarily most colorful, play to date. Production values at South Coast are appropriately subdued and spare.”

From T.H. McCulloh in Drama-Logue: “(It) is a good play, not yet a wonderful one, which could be taken down a peg in its scope or angled more towards its footloose abandon, either of which might give it more of its own personality. Henley has a lot to say about the role of women in history . . . “

In the Orange County Register, Thomas O’Connor wrote: “ ‘Abundance’ has the lyric intensity of Williams, the thematic boldness of Steinbeck and the narrative invention of Flannery O’Connor, the writer Henley most echoes . . . It is terrific theater, accessible at several levels and highly commercial.”

Richard Stayton of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner disagreed: “Inventiveness quickly ends, and ‘Abundance’ withers on the vine. As we watch the increasingly unconvincing melodrama grow ever more static, we suffer through a tawdry emotional climate.”