‘Madame Mao’ at Theatre/Theater; ‘Palabras’ at Theatre/Teatro; ‘Cowards’ at Strasberg; ‘A . . .’ at Celebration; ‘Sisyphus’ at Off Ramp

Madame Mao, facing another morning under permanent house arrest, rises from her prison cot and undertakes her daily regimen with a quiet fury that suggests she’s quite capable of seizing power once again. How dare the People’s Republic, her revolution, restrict her to sewing dolls, reading newspapers and watching television. “China is my medicine, and I will be cured!”

“Madame Mao’s Memories,” a solo woman’s play in the 22-seat matchbox at the rear of Theatre/Theater, is to Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s widow what “Evita” is to Eva Peron. The production takes a powerful woman figure more media-infamous than human and, through the force of artistic imagination and sufficient historical detail, fills her with life.

Actress Kim Miyori, playwright Henry Ong and director Robin McKee create a mesmerizing drama, a non-judgmental portrait of a day in prison with Madame Mao surgically dissecting her political and personal lusts. Among the memories, Miyori re-creates the spider lady’s pre-Mao Shanghai stage career, when she was known as Jiang Qing and performed Ibsen’s Nora in “A Doll’s House.”

Much later, inflamed with power, she is the Red Guard architect purging “artists, dreamers, sex, beauty, love and intellectuals” from the face of China. “Hail the Cultural Revolution!” she smirks, her ferocity threatening to burst the walls of her confinement.

(After Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, Madame Mao, arrested with the Gang of Four, momentarily faced a death sentence that was commuted to life in prison. Today, languishing in house arrest at 74, she is reported to be suffering from throat cancer.)

Miyori is mercurial in her moods and makes Madame Mao’s plunge from arrogant power timeless and placeless.

“Madame Mao’s Memories” is also a crackling woman’s play. “I am not an ornament of Mao’s,” the burnished character snaps, teasing back her hair in the reflection of her mirror.

Playwright Ong’s dramatic license gives this work its verisimilitude. Madame Mao’s ritualistic exercises earmark her unshakable resolve, with a brooding refrain: “Once I was at the zenith of power. . . .”

Lawrence Oberman’s lighting design imaginatively enhances the moody realm of stress and storm.

At 1713 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., through Nov. 5. Tickets: $10-$12; (213) 466-1767.

‘Divinas Palabras’

The Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, dipping into exotica, is staging the U.S. premiere of a 1920 Spanish play, “Divinas Palabras” (“Divine Words”), by maverick Spanish playwright Ramon del Valle-Inclan, unknown here.

But the English-language version at the foundation’s Theatre/Teatro leaves a chaotic imprint. The play, outrageous for its time in Spain, is pure theater of the grotesque, stocked with such human flotsam as a beggar, a blind man and a dwarf in a rural Spanish setting in the late 1800s. Greed, lust and anti-clericalism underscore the work, but visiting Mexican director Xavier Rojas’ farcical twists provide more noise than coherence.

The suspicion is that Rojas’ alternating Spanish-language version is the production to see, if you know Spanish. In English, the tone is unremitting stridency. The grotesques become a splash of gargoyles without any ostensible purpose or discernible structure.

The crumbling church walls of Estela Scarlata’s vivid set design underscore the tension between Catholicism and sexuality, between actress Lori Street’s prostitute-turned-angel and Tonyo Melendez’s Satan/seducer. But this moral schism is mere garishness. Among the 12-member cast, Tamara DeTreaux’s idiot dwarf child is the metaphor that most intrigues.

At 421 N. Avenue 19, Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m., through Nov. 19. Tickets: $12; (213) 225-4044.

‘Cowards’

Does the Lee Strasberg Creative Center have a dramaturge? Isn’t there anybody there who had the temerity to say that the romantic comedy “Cowards” didn’t work because it’s overlong by, say, nearly an hour?

Director Laura J. Graham is a Sam Shepard scholar and maven. Maybe she brought too much Shepard to debuting playwright Samuel Klutznick’s third-hand intimations of Noel Coward and Feydeau.

And what’s a solid actor like John Di Fusco doing in the tortuous marathon lead role? One can also cite Shannon Eubanks and John Lafleur’s wasted efforts. Actually, they are all capable romantic-comedy players (supported by three other performers) plodding through a production that lacks pace, style, whimsy.

The show, set in an East Coast island getaway, takes its relationship sagas rather seriously, when you’re dying for champagne-cork-popping fun instead.

The point is that the playwright’s concept is fine, if derivative. But neither Klutznick nor Graham knows when to shut characters up, when to cut, to sail, to jib.

At 7936 Santa Monica Blvd., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., through Nov. 25. Tickets: $9-$12; (213) 466-1767.

‘A Is for...’

The lack of economy also dogs the single-actor AIDS play, “A Is for . . .” at the Celebration Theatre, the only theater in L.A. committed exclusively to lesbian and gay productions.

Written by and acted by Barry Vincent, the play traces nearly two years in the torment of a young white male who has tested positive as an HIV carrier. We see his uncertainty, we hear the painful calls to his obtuse mom, the dialogues with his lover, his frustration with his doctor over the alphabet soup of AIDS jargon.

Can such a story ever be dated? Not in its essentials, but this production’s unrelenting and ultimately repetitive litany of anger, melancholy and resignation is mournful to endure. Elements of humor and Vincent’s brashness balance the production. What the show should scratch is its deflating intermission. And as is the custom with so much gay theater, the straight audience which would learn and benefit the most either isn’t courted or doesn’t come.

Gay theater appears at a crossroads. Maybe the label itself is obsolete.

At 426 N. Hoover St., Thursdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m., through Nov. 5. Tickets: $10; (213) 876-4257.

‘Sisyphus and Albert’

“The laboring man of today,” Albert Camus wrote, referring to Sisyphus’ eternal chore, “works every day of his life at the same tasks, and that destiny is no less absurd.”

In “Sisyphus and Albert” at the Off Ramp Theatre, Camus finally gets to meet the legendary Corinthian, still pushing that boulder up the hill only to watch it fall; their conversation proves to Camus that his philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” is itself absurd.

The truth is, Sisyphus’ task was actually fun. The damnation was loneliness. Oh, well, Camus can quickly run up a new theme on this variation. This sort of thing might work in the hands of a George Bernard Shaw, but author Lawrence O’Sullivan merely keeps pushing his script up the dramatic mountain only to see it roll back down when he isn’t looking.

Even the stalwart efforts of Alberto Isaac and a few effectively instrospective moments for Prince Hughes’ Sisyphus have trouble surfacing through Les Wieder’s simplistic direction of material which includes such pseudo-rap lyrics as, “Me and Mr. Rock are rollin’ up this hill.”

At 1953 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m., until Nov. 5. Tickets: $10-$12; (213) 465-8059.