A Mum’s Oceanic Fantasy at Ocean Beach Park

Nathan Stein’s “Late Breaking Muse,” is an “oceanic divertimento,” an outdoor fantasy piece for kids of all ages opening Saturday at Ocean Beach Park in Santa Monica.

“We built the (set) in my backyard in Echo Park, being chased inside every Thursday night by the malathion spraying,” said Stein, who’s also one-third of a local juggling group, the Mums. Although the trio has been touted as modern-day vaudevillians, Stein hungers for more political substance. “We cannot just indulge in our own ascetic art bubble. So it’s always more compelling to put the work into that (societal) context. But this is not agitprop.”

Stein’s tale begins with the discovery of trouble in paradise--”the paradise in peril here being Atlantis. Oil spills have begun to beat across the aqua-ceiling. So Poseidon has dispatched his youngest daughter to handle the situation; she arrives in a chariot, newly endowed with arms and legs.”

It’s a state of mind that Stein could well understand. Last year, he was the victim of “a fight with a table saw” that mauled his left arm and forced him to learn juggling all over again. “So I had an enforced sabbatical,” he said. “I learned how caring the theatrical community was. It’s also when the visual poem (“Muse”) began emerging--and with it, grants-writing fever. Now I’ve got what makes all artists tick: funding and a deadline.”

The piece, presented free of charge, was written for four performers (“partly because of financial considerations, partly because it’s the next step after triohood”) and does not feature his fellow Mums. “There were scheduling conflicts,” he says diplomatically. “Although I think the late hours and low pay also factored in.”

THEATER BUZZ: Don’t accuse Brandon Maggart of falling into Hollywood’s type-casting trap. The actor, who played the homophobic Lou for five years on Showtime’s “Brothers”--as well as Lynn Redgrave’s anti-Semitic sibling in ABC’s “Chicken Soup”--will don a milkman’s cap as Tevye in “Fiddler on the West Hollywood Roof” (opening Friday at the Harmony Gold Playhouse), a benefit staging for the AIDS Hospice Foundation. Says a press rep, “He’s a very Jewish Tevye in a very gay spoof of ‘Fiddler.’ ”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Christopher Durang’s “Laughing Wild,” a comedy on the absurdities of modern life, is playing at the Tiffany Theatre. Dennis Erdman (“The Marriage of Bette and Boo”) directs.

Said Sylvie Drake in The Times: “ ‘Wild’s’ barbs are savagely, consistently on target, though at some serious risk of self-defeat. (Its) references to figures of such fleeting celebrity as Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Phil Donahue . . . may not mean much 20 years from now.”

The Daily News’ Lawrence Enscoe found “a tight, tough little piece of monologue work, nicely paced, achingly detailed and full of the kind of quotable lines you want to use at dinner parties. That’s the first act. The second finds itself too mired in familiar Durang turf.”

Wrote Kathleen O’Steen in Daily Variety: “From all of the irreverent images comes a work that finds a good deal of laughter, but also echoes a strange melancholy. The play itself is more commentary and characterization than drama.”