‘Hearts’ a Play at Cross-Purposes With Itself

Murnon Barrow. Kelpy Lockwood. Molina Claflin. Playwright Gabriel Walsh has his own, curious way of doing things, and it begins with his characters’ names in “Hearts,” at the American New Theatre.

The names are halfway to the point of sounding ultra-authentic, yet also halfway down the primrose path of literary pretension. They’re odd, yet they don’t really sing, nor do they suggest the characters themselves.

In a word, the names, like the play, need work.

Only when “Hearts” is over is it clear that Walsh has been at cross-purposes with himself. On one hand, he wants to paint a faintly sardonic view of the desperate lives of three people trapped in the marginalia of a big, nameless American city. He’s fond of having one of his people calling another on their delusions and/or self-deceptions, only to have the tables turned. He’s very interested in suggesting that these three have the minds to make some kind of success, but couldn’t get past certain hurdles.

On the other hand, Walsh wants to make a thinking person’s love story, an Erich Segal tale with loopy dialogue. He believes that he can set up a triangle between people too tired to love, only to find that love will win out in the end.

It doesn’t work. Richard Eden’s Murnon, lumbering around his apartment on crutches (he’s survived a death leap off a bridge, but it’s still too blatant a device), is so thoroughly absorbed in his own inner seriousness that he’s an emotional blank. Though Morton Lewis lets us inside Kelpy’s private madness, which allows him to paint but not live a very good life, he always seems an added-on voice, an agent of the plot.

Director Michele Martin as Molina is curiously--considering the title--the only one with heart, but together enough that we wonder why she hangs around such losers. (The reason she provides, related to a death wish, doesn’t sound right coming from Martin.)

Martin’s directorial approach is a faintly updated version of Method-with-sweat, as if seeing the actors put out will make us believe. But Walsh’s confused play won’t be resolved so easily, although Thomas Brown’s half-dingy, half-romantic lights and set make an asset of “Hearts’ ” mixed signals.

At 1540 Cahuenga Blvd., on Fridays through Sundays, 8 p.m., until July 8. $10; (213) 960-1604.

The Cast’s ‘Fault Line’ Has a Few Faults

Life can get awfully goofy in earthquake country. You may dismiss John Heaner’s “Fault Line,” at the Cast Theatre, as a slightly apoplectic one-joke play, but it’s also emblematic of something larger. California has always been a wonderful, living source for writers, partly because its geology and culture share such profound instability. If “Fault Line” is nothing else, it is absolutely Californian.

Ted Schmitt, the Cast’s late artistic director and guiding light, always had a keen sense for Californian plays; watching “Fault Line,” the first Cast production since Schmitt’s untimely death, is to see Schmitt’s ideas live on.

In fact, Heaner’s play would be a kind of definitive tribute to Schmitt, if only it were a better work. The notion of a soldier of fortune-style survivalist (J. Marvin Campbell) preparing for the Big One, only to have a mild-mannered vagrant (Jason Reed) barge in on him from out of nowhere, is funny by itself, and a sly tribute to the absurdists. Heaner even takes the absurd allegiance a step further, when the men basically trade positions of power in a kind of seismic dance of death.

But it ends up being nothing more than musical chairs, with Campbell’s macho frustrations and Reed’s ultra-sanguine manner, under Harvey Perr’s direction, wearing out their comic welcome. The unlikely entry of a phone repair woman (Sweet Baby J’ai) seems a kind of admission that Heaton hasn’t figured out yet where his play is going. In that way, too, it is very Californian.

At 804 N. El Centro Ave., on Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m., until July 19. $5; (213) 462-0265.

Sewell’s ‘Winter Crane’--Studied, Serious, Strained

In one sense, Richard C. Sewell’s Anglicized Japanese tale, “Winter Crane,” is a natural maiden voyage for the newly reorganized Fountain Theatre. Artistic directors Deborah Lawlor and Stephen Sachs have planned some interesting multicultural programming for the theater (everything from children’s theater in Spanish to an adaptation of Vikram Seth’s California verse novel, “The Golden Gate”). “Winter Crane” is quintessentially multicultural: a play by a white American about medieval Japan with non-traditional casting.

In another sense, “Winter Crane” isn’t the kind of exciting send-off a new theater group might hope for. Director Anne Drecktrah is certainly not abetted by the text. Sewell has too few play-writing instincts and too much reverence for Japanese folk tale tradition: the action perpetually freezes as one of his characters recites a life story. The stasis is odd for a story of a warrior who discovers love and peace while in exile from his lords.

And Drecktrah’s ideas for enlivening “Winter Crane” produce both museum theater and the feel of a pretentious student effort. During these moments of studied recitative, choreographer Bonnie Oda Homsey’s dancers move across the stage with strained attempts at visual interpretation of the story being told.

The actors, though, are the most strained of all, especially Rob Narita’s clenched-teeth manner with his warrior, Uto. The more studied and serious “Winter Crane” becomes, the more it comes perilously close to a parody of Kurosawa’s great film odes to samurai culture.

At 5060 Fountain Ave., on Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., until July 22. $14; (213) 663-1525.

‘Arizona Triangle’ Gets Stranded in the Desert

Take away all of its literary allusions, its metaphorical themes of hunters, sisters and the eternal mother/daughter matrix, and Stacy Roberts’ “Arizona Triangle” at the Callboard Theatre is your basic cautionary tale of what happens when good women do a dumb thing like hitchhiking alone on a desert highway.

In fact, the play might be enjoyable if it were just a thriller, riding on the elixir of plot. The ingredients are there, but, instead, Roberts attempts to draw characters with seemingly deep Oedipal and other complexes. Her dialogue veers between the unadorned and the decorative, as if co-written by competing voices. And while her sisters (played with as much conviction as possible by Roberts and Jeannine Wiest) wrestle with their family demons, they step into an extremely unlikely conflict.

That’s in Act II, at the mesa pad of Bobby (Paul Caruso). In accord with the play’s insistent ambitions, Bobby isn’t just a wily scumbag; he’s a symbol of America gone rotten. You may admire how director Steven Nash moves things along, or how Richard Hoover and Jim Barbaley’s set and Ken Booth’s lights convey a world on the edge of an abyss. But there’s no getting away from a play whose execution simply can’t hold the weighty ideas it’s reaching for.

At 8451 Melrose Place, on Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m., indefinitely. $18-$20; (213) 466-1767.