STAGE REVIEWS : Ironic Fare Shows Padua Hills Festival Has Finally Arrived

Whoever thinks that the only kind of family is of the nuclear variety should drop by this year’s--the 13th--edition of the Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival. At least in the first evening of the two-night, eight-play series, there is ample display of that hallowed theatrical tradition of the extended artistic clan, doing shows together in whatever way they can.

Some have felt that, in the past, the Padua clan, led by artistic director Murray Mednick, was wrapped into itself too tightly. Perhaps, but that tightness is becoming the stuff of real familial endurance.

Their Cal State Northridge home no longer feels like the way-station that previous locations for the nomadic, financially pinched festival have. It may lack the Old California moods of the original Padua Hills locale, or the dramatic, sky-high sightlines of its more recent Cal Arts tenancy, but Northridge’s Art and Design Center humbly and effectively serves the festival’s outdoor, “site-specific” staging ethic.

More importantly, this particular family is producing very solid work. Three of the evening’s four--Kelly Stuart’s “Ball and Chain,” John Steppling’s “Storyland,” and Susan Champagne’s “Bondage”--are ready to go beyond Padua’s safe harbor. (Stuart and Steppling go all the way with the family idea, and put their young kids in their casts.)

Gone is a slightness of material that compromised an experimental spirit, or worse, the feeling that the piece was dashed off the day before. “John (Steppling) is doing a rewrite,” our guide from site to site jokingly explained during a pause. He could joke about it now, since Padua is doing plays, not sketches for plays.

Stuart’s “Ball and Chain,” for example, a nervy, acerbic look at the harried life of Dale (James Oseland), a preschool director. It’s hard to shake whatever feelings you may have about the McMartin case while watching it, even though the children (Demosthenes Stathigiannopoulous and Stuart’s baby, Isabella) are deep in the background. Stuart wants to show how bad childhoods breed bad people, so when watching Dale’s assistant Bernice (Roberta Wallach) play out her anger, or his cousin Ray (James Storm) terrorize anyone he wants to, or Ray’s wife Sylvia (Diane Defoe) misplace both her baby and her mind, we imagine their pasts while wondering how the new kids are going to turn out.

As she did in her last play, “The Woman Who Tried to Shout Underwater,” Stuart balances great empathy with a broad comic sense. She shifts her central characters--this time Oseland’s well-meaning geek--from a place of ridicule to one of sympathy, even as they refuse to shift from their principles. A very tough tightrope act, but director Stuart has a cast keenly adept at the feat, especially Oseland, whose Dale is a diagonal man in a right-angle world.

This tends to make the following piece, Martin Epstein’s “Our Witness,” more drab than it is. Epstein, who has made a specialty of quiet comedies about male-female coupling (“Mysteries of the Bridal Night”), has perhaps trod the territory once too often. This couple (Jan Marie Baldwin and Dave Higgins) is reluctant to tie the knot after living together for seven years, but Epstein hasn’t invented enough funny or interesting causes for their emotional blockage. The few funny lines are harnessed by his actors’ rather stolid reading, as if they had let their characters’ constipated selves get to them.

Steppling’s people in “Storyland” might also be viewed as constipated, but, as in this playwright’s best work, there is a sad sense of loss that cuts through the stifled emotions. At the same time, director Steppling has found an inspired location for a play set in a decaying kiddies’ fun zone: with set designer Laura Carter’s centerpiece of a Pinocchio figure missing a right arm and perched atop a graffiti-marred whale, “Storyland” is told in a grove of fruit trees.

It looks like a place where nothing can go wrong, where adult problems are off-limits. That is what makes “Storyland” so eerily funny and poignant: A milieu of innocence, dominated by the icon of a dark, complex fairy tale, is invaded by worn-out parents (Laura Fanning, Mick Collins and Kathleen Cramer) who commiserate with each other and a wasted park attendant (Rick Dean).

Dean’s Bat, a tired old man at 32, becomes a magnet for their hollow, middle-class lives, a final sounding board for their wishes and despair (Cramer is too insistently bitchy, but Collins is dry, creepy and ribald). Dean, bent over like a present-day Rodin figure, takes it all in but doesn’t know what to do with it, becoming in the end one of the most poetically sorrowful men in Steppling’s canon.

A play titled “Bondage” might seem to be too much after Stepplingland, but Champagne is in a loony mood this time out. (Much of her previous work was gloomy, not loony.) Toots (Molly Cleator, in top form) fears everything from spontaneous combustion to earthquakes, but finds a man (John Pappas, amusingly befuddled) who says the same thing at the same time she does.

Sneakily, Champagne ends her play just as Toots’ luck is happening in the same way for her bizarre roommate, Cheeta (Roxanne Rogers). At first, this feels only half a play, but then we realize what will happen to Cheeta, a lawyer by day and a sadomasochist mistress by night. Everyone, including Dan Sullivan as Cheeta’s new guy, is acutely cast by Champagne.

As for Champagne, so for Padua: what was once a theater of anomie has now become a theater of irony.

At Cal State Northridge’s Art and Design Center, Halsted Street, on Thursdays and Fridays, 7:30 p.m., until Aug. 10. $15-$20. Information: (213) 466-1767.