‘Death’ One-Act Is Classic Woody Allen

Play it again, Woody. Hollywood’s Attic Theatre is about to present its second annual Woody Allen one-act play.

Last summer, Allen’s “God” had a successful run there. Now comes the companion piece, “Death” (1975), opening Friday.

“Kleinman is your classic Woody Allen schlemiel character,” explained Attic artistic director James Carey. “He’s awakened one night by a gang of vigilantes in search of a murdering fiend who’s knocking off 6 to 12 people a night. The police can’t stop him; no one knows who he is. The vigilantes say they have a plan--although they never tell us what it is. Kleinman is pulled into the chase totally unwillingly. He says things like ‘Maybe my boss will be there; I should dress for the occasion.’ ”

The ending is equally irreverent.

“It’s very much a Woody Allen-type play--looking at life, death, God and sex,” Carey emphasized of the hourlong piece (which will play at 8 and 10 p.m.). “Dark, yes. It’s a very black comedy, and we’re doing it very broadly. The script really lends itself to a slapstick, Marx Brothers, almost burlesque style. So the set is two-dimensional cutouts on a pulley system, and as the characters walk across the stage, stagehands move the scenery. It’s very cartoonish and yet realistic. It has his sense of humor.”

THEATER BUZZ: Things have been hopping at the Mark Taper Forum, where the demand for sold-out performances of Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Shakespeare Company has resulted in lines at the box office beginning at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday (the box office opens at 10 a.m.) and at 2 p.m. for the evening performances.

Some of the line-dwellers also have taken up a practice used by next-door “Phantom of the Opera” hopefuls: “borrowing” chairs from the adjacent Music Center Plaza to ease the long wait. As a result, mid-day picnickers at the plaza now do their lunching standing up.

Meanwhile, over at the Taper press office, the publicists have been busy fielding complimentary ticket requests from an endless stream of would-be theatergoers. Like: the out-of-town journalist, whose play reservations hadn’t been confirmed, but nonetheless called to announce that her airline reservations were set and that she’d be arriving that weekend.

Or the writer from a late-night talk show who called one of the publicists many times each day for a week, offering “special” passes for the free tapings of his show as reciprocation for tickets. Or the friends (and friends of friends) who hadn’t been heard from in years. Or all the callers claiming to be reporters.

Said the publicist: “I’ve certainly found out about a lot of newspapers, radio programs and cable TV shows I’d never heard of before.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: In spite of the public clamor, local reviewers were mixed in their appraisal of the Renaissance’s Company’s repertory program of “King Lear” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Said Sylvie Drake in The Times: “What’s lacking all around is substance. Penetration. Subtlety. Branagh’s world is a place without nuance, a long drink of cold water, limpid, refreshing, healthy but without aftertaste. The productions . . . explode. They don’t dig deep and don’t touch us deeply.”

In the Hollywood Reporter, Ed Kaufman said of “Lear”: “What the talented and inventive Branagh has done is to make Shakespeare accessible for all; yet in so doing, he has virtually stripped the figurative quality (and so the metaphysical ‘overview’) from a tragedy that questions everything..”

In reviewing “Lear,” Daily Variety’s Jim Farber wrote: “Branagh, as director, shows himself a young man willing to take on the biggest challenges, able to give ‘Lear’ a sense of grit and violence, but not ready to instill the experience with the multiplicity of layers that complete the drama.”