‘Intimacies’ at Highways; ‘Sudden Theater’ by Pipeline; ‘Waiting for Lefty’ at Company of Angels; ‘Roleplay’ by Group Repertory;

The characters in actor-writer Michael Kearns’ gripping solo performance piece, “Intimacies,” are AIDS outcasts (if that term is not redundant). The characterizations are also sublimely free of advocacy and preachment.

“Intimacies” is not politically correct theater. Some gay activists may cringe at a few of the arch portraits. But under squalor and despair bloom hope and humor, too.

The brisk monologues, at the Highways performance space in Santa Monica, are perhaps the freshest response yet to the alarums and dour responses to AIDS by the media and gay theater. As a writer, Kearns is a modern-day Dickens, capturing with devilish detail AIDS sufferers hooking and injecting their way through life.

But not all these people, whom Kearns enacts with chameleon transformations, are disenfranchised. Take Perfect Patrick. His face, body and confidence are beautiful. He’s an accountant at Disney who has a discreet, perfect relationship with Barry, who’s an agent at William Morris.

Except Patrick gets AIDS and can’t cope, and Kearns’ visage turns both numbing and daunted (Patrick explains he’s going to end it all like Norman Maine in “A Star Is Born,” and it doesn’t come off as a joke). Big Red is a black street hooker, Phoenix is blind and lives under a freeway, Rusty is an infected white hustler/junkie, Mary is a mother with AIDS who knows it’s the Lord’s punishment. And so it goes, like figures in a painting by George Grosz.

Kearns’ only props are a stool and a red scarf. His vocal dexterity and varied personas don’t rely on costume changes. The austerity of pain, you might call it.

Kelly Hill directed. Original music (Darien Martus) and computer graphics (Michael Tidmus) lend flavorful support.

“Don’t talk to me about gay brotherhood!” shouts one of the victims in the opening line. Kearns makes these people stand alone--because that’s where they are.

At 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, Saturdays and Sundays, 8:30 p.m.; June 18, 3 p.m. Through June 25. Tickets: $10. (213) 453-1755.

‘Sudden Theater’

Pipeline, in its airy space at the Saxon Lee Gallery, has devised a tasty format that features a quartet of offbeat, one-actor performance works, flavorfully augmented with live, original music.

“Sudden Theater,” adapted from short short stories, is notable for its unpredictability, its sly and wicked humor, and its rich language.

Scott Kelman’s direction is almost blithesome.

Kelman himself, with deliberate, tantalizing delivery, enacts the evening’s plum, “Night Rider,” a quietly hilarious account of a man’s jealous, obsessive highway pursuit of love (adapted from a book called “T Zero” by the late Italo Calvino).

Peter Coca’s performance of his autobiographical “Good Friday” is a vivid, erotic inner monologue on the occasion of his best friend’s funeral. (This opening number comes off as a ripe companion piece to “A Bronx Tale,” playing across town at Theatre West.)

“Dog Life,” by Mark Strand, is about a woman (an uncanny rendering by Jane Zingale) who, simply put, used to be a canine. She tries explaining that to her husband, and you believe her!

The show concludes with Donald Barthelme’s larky but less accomplished “King of Jazz,” performed by the brightly garbed John Densmore, original drummer with The Doors, who accompanies himself with light percussive riffs.

Original music on the other sets is by Jay Green and David Zasloff.

At 7525 Beverly Blvd., Saturdays and Sundays, 8 p.m., through June 25. Tickets: $9-$12. (213) 629-2205.

‘Waiting for Lefty’

For a few shining years with the start of the Group Theatre, Clifford Odets was our finest revolutionary playwright. The explosive debut in 1935 of Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty” is beautifully caught in the knuckle-duster of a production at the Company of Angels in Silver Lake.

Director Paul Brennan, who doubles as a fiery orator, has taken this agitprop play and its archaic language and made it sing with a palpable ferocity. We’re in a grungy union hall. A gnarled bunch of taxi drivers, some of them raging through the audience, are about to strike their corrupt bosses. The language of revolt swirls around us. We feel the country wheezing, the order collapsing.

A splendid ensemble cast--including the wheedling pain of Richard Morof’s out-of-work actor, Quinn Harmon’s desperate wife, and John Bluto’s fat cat stooge--create a headlong momentum that reflects the play’s touching innocence. The blunt cameos of despair that unfold outside the union hall are spun with faded texture.

The whole business breezes by in an hour. The Depression becomes a variation of now. After the fire that gutted its old home in Hollywood last year, the Company of Angels has returned with a whoop.

At 2106 Hyperion Ave., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., extended indefinitely. Tickets: $8-$10. (213) 466-1767.

‘Melodrama Play’

Sam Shepard can be infuriatingly elusive. A pair of his early one-acts dealing with the pressures leading to artistic suicide, “Melodrama Play” (in its L.A. premiere) and “Suicide in B Flat,” are particularly maddening.

The productions at the Attic Theater are sharply cast (notably the visceral Dean Iandoli as a fraudulent rock star in “Melodrama Play” and loony David Alan Graf as a jazz musician in “Suicide in B Flat”). They intelligently wed Shepard to live musical accompaniment by the Low Dogz (original compositions by Robert Rose) and director Bruce Whitney seems attuned to Shepard’s idioms and rhythms. It’s not the stagings that make you work to no avail, but the plays themselves.

“Suicide in B Flat” (1976) is an arrogant cacophony of words, mixing illusion and reality. “Melodrama Play” (1967), is less aggravating, its youth culture convincingly mirrored by actors Geoff Ullman, Tom Burruss and Kimm Rooney as rock ‘n’ roll demons and angels.

At 6562 Santa Monica Blvd., Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, 8 p.m., through June 25. Tickets: $10-$12, (213) 666-1427.

‘Roleplay’

Mark Twain’s advice to a friend--”Sorry I wrote you such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write you a shorter one”--finds its perfect counterpart in the musical “Roleplay” at the Group Repertory Theatre. The all-female show could be a gem if its two-hour-plus playing time and 18 musical numbers were cut by a good third.

The production, otherwise helmed with ensemble panache by Allison Liddi, staggers rather than zings because its ordinary story of five women baring their emotions in group therapy sessions cannot justify the sheer bulk of tunes.

More economy would heighten the show’s twin virtues: the clever legerdemain that occurs when the characters roleplay their troubled relationships, and the cast’s uniformly vibrant vocalizing.

Doug Haverty and Adryan Russ’ music and lyrics propel the book, and some of the numbers are quite good (especially Jodi Carlisle’s “Thin” and Claudia Fenton’s “Do It at Work”). But after a point, Pat Carney’s musical staging becomes repetitious, and the performers’ turns look showcasey.

Pat Lentz’s dynamic executive, Reenie Moore’s ‘90s flower child, and Bonnie Snyder’s therapist complete the strong cast.

At 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 5 p.m., through July 1. Tickets: $8-$10. (818) 769-PLAY.