FESTIVAL ’90 : STAGE REVIEW / L.A. FESTIVAL : Abdoh Stumbles With ‘Pasos’

Everyone should be allowed a misstep. But with “Pasos en la Obscuridad,” theater wizard Reza Abdoh’s contribution to the Los Angeles Festival (written with Frank Ambriz), it’s not easy.

This spoof of the overwrought Mexican telenovela , spoken entirely in mostly incomprehensible Spanish (due to rotten acoustics), becomes its own parody in the long run. And it is a lonnnng runnnn: a three-hour rambling, ragtag, redundant indulgence in drag, performed in the stifling Terrace Room of the Park Plaza Hotel. Add to that the fact that it starts at 10:30 p.m. and you have a scenario only slavish Abdoh devotees can love.

Also, one surmises, devotees of the tacky-on-purpose raunchiness of drag shows. The so-bad-it’s-good syndrome. There is enough lip-syncing, cross-dressing, black lighting and Day-Glo colors to suggest the chance that “Pasos en la Obscuridad” (or “Footsteps in the Dark,” changed at the 11th hour from “Pisadas en la Obscuridad,” which means the same thing) could become a midnight special a la “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” But it’s doubtful. In its present underprepared condition, “Pasos” is much too exasperating, even if it is intentionally pursuing an aura of amateurishness.

There’s no way of knowing if that was indeed the game plan, but Abdoh is too sharp and talented an artist to veer this far off the mark. His “Minamata” (1989) and “Rusty Sat on a Hill” (1986) needed editing, but were fundamentally works of precision and depth. At least some of the sloppiness here had to be willed.

To go over the convolutions of plot would be a waste of space and time. They’re impossible to follow if you don’t speak the language, and only partially possible to follow of you do, because of the abominable miking and the echo in the room. A detailed English synopsis is provided that’s almost as confusing as the show.

The plot attempts to mimic the worst of the telenovelas with a pair of arch-rival female song-stylists (Raul Alvarado and Juan Felix Cortez) who meet up with calamities of the corazon , a masked Phantom of the Park Plaza (Hector Aristizabal), a Spanish-speaking Chinese hunchback (Tony Santiago in an odd casting twist) who runs a massage parlor and heads a test-tube baby smuggling ring--and the bulging pectorals and biceps of body-builder Rick Valente.

Fredric Myrow fills in at the piano when pre-recorded Mexican songs are not playing. Add to that inadmissible choreography, excessive use of a sweepingly inaccurate follow-spot and you have it. No wonder heroine Manola (Alvarado) ends up committing suicide by swallowing bottles of pills--the bottles, not the pills--and finishes it by sticking her head in the toilet and pulling the chain (something Abdoh might consider doing with this script).

Why kill herself? Because it’s getting on to 1:30 a.m. and long past the time to go home.

Whatever the original aspirations of “Pasos en la Obscuridad,” it has become, as Guglielmo Shakespeare might have put it, much ado about nada . This is a free event, but it costs to sit through it.

At the Park Plaza Hotel, 607 N. Park View, through Sunday, 10:30 p.m. Free; (213) 623-7400.