New Cast Shifts the Focus of Durang’s ‘Laughing Wild’

Many people read Christopher Durang’s “Laughing Wild” as his update on the kids in his “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You.” Both plays have much in common: an elliptical structure of group scenes and monologues, and seemingly Catholic characters. But “Laughing Wild” is just as easily read as Durang’s look at how people did or didn’t cope with the Reagan Era. Mostly didn’t.

This is even clearer with the new cast in Dennis Erdman’s Tiffany Theatre production. Christine Ebersole and Grant Shaud have replaced Jean Smart and Durang in the two-character piece, and while the comic energy is at a lower level, they’ve broadened Durang’s subject. Whereas Smart and Durang seemed fixed as lapsed Catholics searching for meaning, Ebersole and Shaud suggest, respectively, WASPy and Jewish New Yorkers trying to cope. Before, this was a faintly religious comedy; now, it’s a social one.

The religious subject isn’t diminished, but with Shaud as a budding New Ager desperately grasping for his piece of positivity, or appearing as the Infant of Prague in a dream he shares with Ebersole, the religious satire is far softer than it was with Durang’s deadpan approach.

Durang the actor was so funny that, even though his monologue for the woman is the funniest writing he’s ever managed, he got more laughs than Smart.

Now, it’s Ebersole’s turn. This woman doesn’t look crazy, as Shaud later remarks (so her claim that she “made ‘The Frances Farmer Story’ look like ‘The Love Boat’ ” still doesn’t fly). She emerges into mild insanity, looking a little surprised and tilting her head at the nutty remark she just made. But we just might agree with her, too, and also want to see Dr. Ruth and Sally Jessy Raphael fight to the death in the Colosseum.

Ebersole invites us to share with her, while Smart tended to put her on display. It brings out the humanity in a playwright who can often be too harsh for his own good.

At 8532 Sunset Blvd., Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., indefinitely. $22-$24; (213) 652-6165.

‘Frontal Groundlings’ Lands on Its Feet

The Groundlings are usually ahead of their audience. The good improv groups tend to be, and with this town’s seemingly limitless supply of comedy groups (and the limitless demand for them), the Groundlings have set the standard.

On Saturday, though, the first skit in their new show, “Full Frontal Groundlings,” found an audience ahead of them . The plan was for John Cervenka to stump audience members with little tests like naming a tune played by music director Alan Axelrod or naming the solar system’s nine planets. But this audience passed the test.

If the evening was all improv, this might have sent things into a tailspin. The show, though, is roughly 70% scripted or improvs on a set structure, and several of the subsequent pieces really went somewhere: Kathy Griffin became a funny Jewish Encino lambada dancer; Heather Morgan and Cervenka turned popcorn eating in a movie theater into a nutty rite, and Melanie Graham, Julia Sweeney and Patrick Bristow turn an I-15 rest stop into a comic hellhole.

Above all was Sweeney, plainly a gifted comic voice. Her solo pieces, “Career Day” and “The Beautiful Mother/Daughter Dinner,” are ironic portraits of delusionary women: the first, a hugely endowed dumb model, giving a witless speech to her fellow high school students on her career choice; the second, a mom who finds anything worthy of amazement and endless, windy talk.

The second half succumbed to the unfortunate racism of “Persian Rugs” and the always-dubious instinct to jump to sexual innuendo when a skit is in doubt. Still, even though sex is live comedy’s ultimate cliche, it’s good to hear that, in the Helms Chill, sex isn’t being put back in the closet.

At 7307 Melrose Blvd., Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 8 and 10 p.m., indefinitely. $8.50-$17.50; (213) 934-9700.

Incest Survival Focus of ‘Secrets’

Since it opened in August, 1988, Libbe S. HaLevy’s “Shattered Secrets” has become for incest “survivors” (as they prefer identifying themselves) what the song “That’s What Friends Are For” became for people with AIDS: a rallying point, an encapsulated expression of a world of pain. “Secrets” has a potentially enormous audience to speak to (the program claims, albeit without footnotes, that one in three girls and one in eight boys will be forced into some form of sex with an adult). That is likely why it has one of the longest runs in L.A. theater.

It’s therapy, but is it a play? Yes, but not a very good one. HaLevy’s setting is an evening meeting of Incest Anonymous, a self-help group of survivors. The group too deliberately cuts across America’s social strata (only Indians go unrepresented), and the play is yoked with bland exposition and epic-length speeches.

To anyone who’s been to an Alcoholics Anonymous or similar 12-Step-Program meeting, this will sound familiar. But what works in the real world of the healing process does not necessarily work on the stage. A climactic series of outbursts are powerfully jarring under Jerry Craig’s intelligently-cast direction, but the effect is hearing a bomb drop that we expected all along.

Craig himself becomes a scary split-personality, and Bibi Besch is a savagely bitter woman who really needs the plastic bat and couch the group uses to get the rage out. The actors, in fact, find artful shadings that elude the polemical HaLevy. She’s explored her feelings, but she needs to explore the play as a play.

At 3116 2nd St.in Santa Monica, Mondays, 8 p.m. Indefinitely. $8; (213) 392-6529.