An Auspicious Debut for a Cozy Theater

Studio Barbara Feldman, tucked away in a corner of the Rodeo Collection in Beverly Hills, is making an auspicious theatrical debut with “Zeitgeist,” four one-acts dealing with love and sex in a neurotic society.

The evening is exceptionally classy--from the great sightlines and intimacy of the cozy theater to the sheen, wit and discipline of the production. For the discriminate shopper, here’s indeed the best buy on Rodeo Drive.

The achievement is low-key, and there’s not a wrinkle in the whole production. The two-character one-acts, helmed with liquefaction by Ben Frank, put a surprising spin on characters we might have seen before--but seldom with the burnished illumination evident here.

The production also highlights the crisp writing of John Benjamin Martin (who doubles as an actor in two of the plays).

His strongest play is “Buy the Hour.” A nervous, rich woman in her 50s, who seemingly has never left the decade of the ‘50s, purchases a male prostitute and then doesn’t know what to do with him. The twist is what happens to the stud (playwright Martin), whose composure is subtly cracked by a client who grows in stature. Kate Merrick is achingly touching as the woman.

In “Evan Evans,” Martin plays a sunny but simple-minded, bedridden social reject in a slight but keenly felt vignette on the near-homeless. Leonard Termo’s gruff, unkempt panhandler buddy, with his big smeary moonface betraying love for his fellow outcast, keeps sentimentality at bay.

The curtain-raiser, “Unconditional Sperm,” features a deliciously business-like turn by Sydne Squire as a single, would-be mother. She’s interviewing a potential sperm donor and strong genetic prospect (drolly played by Jack Riley) until he reveals a certain problem. Ripe satiric stuff.

The finale, “The Road to Salvation,” is a dance of lust on a park bench between a skirt chaser with a gleam in his eye and a born-again Christian with a great derriere. The pony-tailed Eric Rosse turns a cliche role into an original piece of characterization, and the suppressed Wendy MacDonald, who’s trying to read “The Little Prince,” is delightful.

At 415 Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, Fridays through Sundays, 8 p.m., indefinitely. $10. (213) 278-4447.

‘Benno Blimpie’ Misses at Friends and Artists

The prisoner of flesh at Friends and Artists Theatre is “eating myself to death,” as he puts it, and the opening and closing images of the grotesquely fat young man in the jumbo jeans catches his isolation and self-hatred.

But there must be more than ugliness in playwright Albert Innaurato’s “The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie.” The crucifixion image at the end demands that Benno, reviled and rejected by his monstrous family, mirrors a dignity that elevates the play beyond the freakish.

Director Rick Rose, although working with a strong cast, never really transcends the Poor Me aspect of this play. Two actors play Blimpie--Michael Berry as the inner, normal-looking Benno whose tormented memories make up most of the play, and Mat Kirkwood as the fat Benno. The actors don’t remotely suggest one another, and that hurts the production. The play, which seems to owe a lot to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” needs a dominant actor in the blubber role.

The shrill mother and macho father are well drawn by Bobbie Dearing and Kirkwood (doubling as the seemingly inflatable Benno). And Bridgid Coulter as the sexy Lolita type who plays naughty games in the park with grandpa (Bradford Roberts) is saucy and well cast, though their lecherous encounters are repetitive.

The play is usually teamed with Kitty Johnson’s one-act “Triplet,” but it wasn’t staged on the night attended.

At 1761 N. Vermont Ave., Thursdays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., indefinitely. $8. (213) 664-0689.

Lifeless ‘Portrait’ on Santa Monica Pier

The Waterfront Stage on the Santa Monica Pier is presenting an ambitious, true-life French drama about a young medical student who murdered her lover in 1951 and was condemned to hard labor for life. It sounds like terrific tabloid drama, but French playwright Michel Vinaver’s “Portrait of a Woman” is curiously lifeless.

The chief dramatic problem is the murderer herself. Molly O’Leary has the unenviable task of portraying a woman so baffling and self-contained that neither the court nor the theater audience can summon an ounce of pity for her. She refuses to conform to the role the males in the play expect of her, contrite or otherwise.

Intellectually, that silence is interesting, putting her in the company of that other famous French prisoner, the fictional Meursault, in Camus’ novel “The Stranger.” But dramatically, at least in translation, this “Portrait” is inert.

At least Camus’ existential hero could explode at the end. But as a French woman of the ‘50s, our taciturn heroine is dull and mute. The fragmented courtroom events and flashbacks with parents and lovers become a grueling litany.

There’s no arc or momentum to events. Most of the actors are fine, with strong voices, but everything in the show, co-directed by Frederique Michel and Charles Duncomb, happens as if under water.

More dramatic license is needed to make comprehensible that this character was a woman ahead of her time who refused to play society’s game. None of this is clear. (The tragic postscript is that the woman, whose real name was Pauline Dubuisson, was released from prison in 1964 and committed suicide a few years later.)

At 250 Santa Monica Pier, Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., through April 21. $6.25-$12.50. (213) 393-6672.

Well-Named ‘Nervous Set’ at the Heliotrope

Billed as the only beatnik musical ever produced on Broadway, “The Nervous Set” was a nervous wreck Wednesday night at the Heliotrope Theatre.

An actor who plays a Jack Kerouac figure took the night off to attend an audition, and a newcomer painfully filled in, script in hand. Allowing for that, the production is a klutz of a show with remarkably tacky scenic design and a book by Jay Landesman and lyrics by Fran Landesman that have not aged well since the show flopped on Broadway in 1959 (notwithstanding rewrites by co-adapters Patti Astor and Anita Rosenberg).

The glorious legacy of the Beats is observed by director Stuart Rogers with the kind of manic affection once reserved for flappers and purveyors of bathtub gin. The show, rather than a gentle spoof of the Beat Generation (a good idea), comes off as a sendup of amateur theatricals.

The live, four-piece band is smartly led by Jay Gore but the group’s rendition of Tommy Wolf’s music does not begin to evoke the 1951 jazz-drenched time frame.

Leslie Ferrera is vivid as the quintessential upper-class girl. Also animating the show are David Kramer as the idealistic editor of the Village radical magazine Nerves and Vernon Willet as a Gary Snyder-like poet.

The Beats haven’t translated well to stage or film, but the 1980 movie “Heart Beat,” with Nick Nolte’s Neal Cassady, John Heard’s Jack Kerouac and Ray Sharkey’s Allen Ginsberg is at least a place to start--outside the writing, of course.

At 660 N. Heliotrope Ave., Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m., through April 19. $15; (213) 466-1767.