‘Bein’ With Behan’ at West End Playhouse

The three set pieces on stage at the West End Playhouse quickly place a frame around Michael L. Kavanagh’s one-man “Bein’ With Behan.” A battered upright piano, a table with a half-empty tumbler of Guinness beside a battered typewriter and an old-fashioned booth partition with a bare wooden seat place the time (a good while ago) and the place (McDaid’s Pub in Dublin).

McDaid’s is a writers’ hangout and no one hung out more (or was more hung over) than Brendan Behan--Irish poet, playwright, bon vivant and legendary IRA scrapper. His life was the stuff of romance: imprisoned at 16 for transporting IRA explosives to Liverpool; jailed again at home for further revolutionary indiscretions and released in the general amnesty of 1946; internationally acclaimed for his prose (“Borstal Boy”) and plays (“The Quare Fellow,” “The Hostage”), and through it all celebrating the Irish spirit as grandly as O’Casey and Synge.

In the years Kavanagh has been doing this piece he has allowed Behan to inhabit his being. Or is it the other way round? He is discovered hunting and pecking at the typewriter, slugging amiable mouthfuls of stout, turning to the audience as though it were another patron of McDaid’s approaching him.

Kavanagh, as Behan, grabs at the opportunity. He talks about his youth as a house painter’s apprentice, about his mother (“a peasant once removed” who “died regularly every week for years”) and the harsh reality of the Dublin working class in the first half of the 20th Century (“To get something to eat was an achievement; to get something to drink was a complete victory”). Kavanagh takes us with Behan through the prison terms and skirmishes on the embattled streets of Ireland, through personal traumas and the beginnings of creative fulfillment.

Behan is difficult to stop once he gets going--he is a Celt, after all--and only interrupts himself when the urge overcomes him to have another Guinness and break out with a haunting Irish melody.

Kavanagh knows the humor of his subject, and his sadness, and his will to further the cause--of both Behan and the IRA. Under Bruce Heighley’s direction, it is a performance full of humanity and a ripe understanding of the skyrocket that was Behan.

The viewer who approached Behan at the beginning feels a little lonely when the great man drains another glass and turns back to his typewriter.

At 7446 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys; Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5 p.m.; ends Feb. 4. Tickets: $15; (818) 904-0444.

‘Orpheus in New Orleans’ at Inglewood Playhouse

“Orpheus in New Orleans” is an ambitious project. At the Inglewood Playhouse, those ambitions are barely realized. The production suffers primarily from the bane of musicals, a less than adequate book.

There is a story, a modern reworking of the Orpheus legend centered around Mardi Gras and involving prostitution and voodoo. But the characters in Henry Adams’ skimpy book don’t rise above comic book level. They act and react on the most simplistic impulses. The viewer is never drawn into their problems and doesn’t leave with much concern for their traumas.

The score (music by Alfred Johnson and Henry Butler, lyrics by Johnson and Martin Kibbee) is lively, often amusing (“Good loving just don’t last, but good cookin’ do” sung by an overweight hooker) and contains a couple of affecting ballads (“Say You Will” and the heroine’s lament “Alone”). But it doesn’t have the size that this type of musical requires.

The evening is almost made worthwhile by some of the performances, particularly Valerie Washington’s Mama Roux, madam and voodoo maven; Mironda Lewis’ simple heroine Eulalia; Arthur Burghardt’s medicine-man-styled narrator, Bayou John, and Phillip Lewis’ cool and jazzy ne’er-do-well Willy. Their vocal work is outstanding. But the material they have to deal with does little to keep the legend alive.

In Centinela Park, off Warren Street, Inglewood; Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m.; ends Jan. 28. Tickets: $10; (213) 936-7600 or (213) 281-1914.