STAGE REVIEW : West Coast Series a Mixed Bag of One Acts

If a festival of one-act plays is doing its job, it should allow us to sample vigorous and completely different voices. Not like a “Best of” anthology, but like a testing ground where some experimentation can take place.

We sampled Series C of the West Coast Ensemble’s “Sixth Celebration of One Acts” on Saturday, in the hopes of finding something exciting. Patrick Cleary’s “Circles of Time” was an exercise in an extended dialogue between divorcees who happen to run into each other at a train station. We wait for the trains to arrive so the dialogue can end (Megan Foley directed Patrick Pankhurst and Cynthia Steele).

Then things got exciting. Lisa Loomer worked up the nerve to concoct a 10-character, multiscene, mini-epic titled “Chain of Life” that owes as much to the metafiction of Donald Barthelme and Don DeLillo and underground comics as it does to theater. Loomer’s tale is about how TV can rule people’s lives, from the scriptwriting partners who must face heart bypass surgery (Richard Large and Ben D’Aubery) to a producer/agent hooked on Terry Cole Whittaker tapes (Richard Israel, too young for the role) to a mother and daughter who live in front of the tube (Janet Lambert and Ashley M. Sparks).

Loomer zig-zags between them, showing the loony process from pitch to broadcast of a “Vietnam/hospital/cop dramedy.” This is just a warm-up for the entrance of filmmaker Alejandro Maldonowski (Dane Christopher, in a cutting spoof of real-life filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky), who claims to be more interested in animals than people. That’s how he seduces Sparks, who tends to a horse stable, and Israel, who likes the box-office numbers on Maldonowski’s latest movie (“Animals are fresh!”).

This is house-of-mirrors theater (as opposed to kitchen sink theater) where excess is the name of the game, and the moral creeps up on you from behind. Sharon Lee Connors’ direction, placing the action into separate squares of space like a comic strip, makes it all seem to take place in about five minutes. This is what a festival is all about.

A festival is also about going from the comic to the grim, and expecting the audience to follow along. This is just what happened with the final entry, Martin Zurla’s “Grandfather,” a very grim look at the Holocaust’s legacy.

Zurla’s drama hinges on a secret that every audience member should swear not to reveal upon exiting the theater, but “Grandfather” has some serious problems with build-up. His characters--a grandfather (Alfred Rose, very Old World), a grandmother (Billye Wallace, who should be very Old World but isn’t) and a grandson (Aleksey Lazaryev, very stilted)--speak in complete sentences without contractions, and play chess in an outdoor patio.

Dull, but life can be dull until someone is forced to admit a lie. Steven Avalos’ direction makes less dramatic fire out of the moments of truth than is potentially in Zurla’s script, but it sends us away thinking. A festival should do that as well.

At 6240 Hollywood Blvd., tonight at 8 p.m., then rotating with Series A and B, Tuesdays through Sundays until June 10. $12; (213) 871-1052.