Gallery Stage Set for Short-Story Acting

Short stories come to the stage in “Sudden Theatre,” a collection of four one-person theater pieces produced by Pipeline and opening this weekend at the Saxon-Lee Gallery.

The performers include Peter Coca (whose original narrative describes a first sexual experience), Doors drummer John Densmore (doing Donald Barthelme’s “The King of Jazz”), Scott Kelman (performing Italo Calvino’s “Night Rider”--”an obsessive flight of madness on a highway in pursuit of a woman I love”) and Jane Zingale (doing Mark Strand’s “Dog Life”--about “a very unusual past-life experience”).

The pieces, which range from 15 to 23 minutes in length, have musical accompaniment by Jay Green and David Zasloff. Densmore also plays drums in his own piece.

“I’ve always liked people who write literature much better than playwrights,” said Kelman, Pipeline’s artistic director. The challenge, he said, “is to translate the (theatrical) elements to the stage and still preserve the author’s narrative. It’s not an adaptation, because it preserves the integrity of the writing. I found with these you could transfer (the quality).”

Kelman believes the collection will convince a lot of actors of the possibilities of short stories as source material.

“(The form) acknowledges the presence of an audience. The narrative has its own personal urgency. It requires no set. The audience meeting place becomes the collective imagination; there are no limitations to what you can create in that space. In regular narrative theater, it’s always a re-enactment--although it pretends not to be. We don’t have to do that! I’m tired of suspending my disbelief.”

DANCE TALK: Another untraditional performance form takes flight in Great Leap’s “Talk Story, Chapter Two” (opening Friday as a rental at the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Theater 4), which group member Nobuko Miyamoto describes as a series of Asian-American “song-stories: musical pieces that express stories using words, movement and song. They’re like poems, in that each one captures a moment, a character, a situation.”

Miyamoto (who co-founded the six-member group with Jose De Vega in 1976) has written songs about the Asian-American experience and wrote the music and lyrics in “Talk Story.”

“And I’m a dancer,” she said, “so in many ways, this has been an experiment to integrate them. I also like the idea of a montage, different stories--like ‘The Colored Museum’--with unconnected characters. It gives us the freedom to move around. Yet as a whole, we create an impression of the diversity of our experience.”

“Talk Story, Chapter Two” is directed by Daniel Kwan and choreographed by Young-Ae Park.

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Tom Griffin’s “The Boys Next Door,” a story about the lives of four mentally handicapped men, is winding up its run at the Pasadena Playhouse. Josephine R. Abady directs.

Said Don Shirley in The Times: “This is an openly calculated play, but the calculations add up. And they serve their ultimate goal--by play’s end, we do recognize the bonds that connect us to ‘the boys next door.’ ”

The Herald Examiner’s Richard Stayton found the play “simplistic yet amusing, exploitive yet respectful. It’s not a breakthrough work, and it relies on sentimentality and cliches to win over the audience. But while focusing on the abnormal ‘boys,’ it’s captivating.”

The Daily News’ Tom Jacobs appreciated Abady’s direction, but not “Griffin’s apparent inability to throw away a good laugh line. The jokes keep coming, through all of Act 1 and into Act 2, effectively trivializing the characters and their situations.”

In the Pasadena Weekly, John Mahoney was offended: “Griffin goes for jokes at the expense of the . . . characters. It doesn’t seem to bother him that most of the jokes are anachronistic malapropisms, self-conscious puns, far too abstract, terribly forced . . . and too sophisticated in the worst sense.”

Cheered Frances Baum Nicholson in the Pasadena Star-News: “It is enlightening as documentary. It is a phenomenal acting lesson. And it is often very, very funny. . . . The production is tightly woven by director Abady. It is very real--too real for true comfort.”

And from the Hollywood Reporter’s Ron Pennington: “Griffin explores this sensitive material in an entertaining manner, although the play does occasionally slip into the didactic. . . . Lance Davis, Mel Winkler, Robert Machray and Jeff Dreisbach star as the four men, and there is remarkable honesty to each of the characterizations.”