STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Shatter’ Highlights Padua Hills B Evening

Series B of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, at Cal State Northridge, betrays a tendency to cram too much into each play--perhaps because four plays have to be pigeonhold into one evening. Three plays suffer from this compression. But the fourth--Murray Mednick’s “Shatter ‘n Wade”--survives fairly well, perhaps because one of Mednick’s points is to illustrate the current onslaught of half-baked information and cockamamie theories.

The evening begins with Roxanne Rogers’ “Book of Numbers.” We meet racetrack pickpocket Lu (Robin Frates) and her boyfriend Sticks (Robert Hummer) at the beginning of their romance. They move in together, she becomes pregnant, her daffy long-separated parents (Joe Bellan and Pamela Gordon) also move to the couple’s “boxes by the side of the road” in order to help out.

The characters are engaging in their eccentricities, especially when Lu’s parents literally try to dress and dance their way out of their gloom. But the predominantly light tone makes the grim incident of domestic violence that ends the play seem insufficiently set up. Rogers hasn’t yet found a way to merge her several styles into a coherent whole.

Padua Hills artistic director Mednick uses his venue well in “Shatter ‘n Wade.” The production is set on the concrete sidewalk outside a classroom, which looks much like the site where the fictional situation would take place.

That situation is a vaguely defined neighborhood meeting, which apparently exists primarily to let everyone sound off about whatever social or cultural phenomena are bugging them. The meeting takes place inside the classroom, and we hear samples of the oratory whenever the door opens. But the discussion also has spilled onto the sidewalk, where the informality and the motion of people coming and going create more dynamic stage pictures--and more give-and-take between characters--than we would get if we were stuck inside the classroom.

The characters are a lively lot. William Dennis Hunt plays a brash entrepreneur who may be running for office (there’s a poster with his picture on it in the classroom window). He is having troubles with his offspring: the hostile, dyed-redhead Shatter (Susannah Blinkoff) and the more zonked-out, green-haired Wade (David Officer), who has a boom box attached to his right arm and a nasty habit of totaling cars.

Also on hand are a brooding history professor (Scott Paulin) and his prim-looking wife (Allison Studdiford), who may have a wilder past than he knew, and several others. The talk doesn’t accomplish anything purposeful, but Mednick does brew up a sense of the comedy and fragility of human life in contemporary California.

After intermission, Leon Martell tells “Brick Time Stories: Tales of Death and Recipes of Mayhem,” intertwining narratives about his friends Billy and Ed and his martial-arts teacher, a Korean he calls “the Master.” Billy is most notable for having set an unofficial world’s record for breaking bricks with his hands and Ed for being a Wally Cox look-alike who fell in love with a fellow martial-arts student. It’s the Master, however, whose story finally emerges as the most troubling and remarkable.

We won’t give away what happens to the Master, but as in “Book of Numbers,” the events that end the story come from too far out of the blue. Martell spends excess time on lesser matters before weighing in with sensational news at the end. It’s hard for both him and his audience to switch gears so fast, and the piece would be stronger without his explicitly preachy, superfluous tag line. His habit of repeatedly passing bricks around the audience is distracting after the first time around.

Alan Bolt’s “Salsa Opera” has been cut from nearly two hours to 45 minutes for the purposes of Padua, and the result almost seems like a “Highlights of ‘Salsa Opera’ ” instead of the real thing. Because some scenes are missing, the sequence of those that remain feels somewhat disorganized and arbitrary.

Nevertheless, Miguel Delgado’s staging uses its Northridge site admirably, showing a group of Latino immigrants scaling a chain-link fence to enter the United States. The stars overhead and the use of flashlights evoke an illegal border crossing, after which the libretto veers between encounters with demons (half-masked in silver, as in “The Phantom of the Opera”), memories of home and a satirical scene in which the Immigration and Naturalization Service welcomes the newcomers with flags flying.

A five-man Latino band provides heady accompaniment, and the musical performances, in several styles, are accomplished. Ultimately, though, the script is simplistic, even mawkish, as well as disjointed, and--at least in this truncated version--it doesn’t track the two central characters (Irma “Cui Cui” Rangel and Steve Salas) closely enough. The Mark Taper Forum’s “Bocon!” treated a similar subject, in a similar style, with greater success.

“Salsa Opera” is sung in Spanish, but synopses are available.

At Cal State Northridge’s Art and Design Center, Halsted Street, on Saturdays and Sundays, 7:30 p.m., until Aug. 12. $15-$20. Information: (213) 466-1767.