STAGE REVIEW : Brechtian Broadside by Actors’ Gang

We can only hope that Ariane Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soliel, last here for the ’84 Olympic Arts Festival, might return someday. (Not likely.)

We can only pray that El Gran Circo Teatro de Chile, just here for the L.A. Festival, might return someday. (More likely. Maybe.)

But, after what Los Angeles’ own Actors’ Gang is currently displaying at the Odyssey Theatre with its production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Good Woman of Setzuan,” hopes and prayers are beside the point. If El Gran Circo proved that it’s Chile’s carrier of the great Mnouchkine tradition, then the Gang is proving that it’s the American equivalent.

Through growing surges (like “Carnage”) and growing pains (like “The Big Show”), the nearly decade-old Gang, with “Good Woman,” has blossomed into a unit to take on the world. A day after seeing El Gran Circo’s extraordinary “La Negra Ester,” there was the Gang equaling--and sometimes surpassing--the Chileans.

The parallels were almost spooky. “Ester” is about a prostitute, is staged on a resonantly “poor” set of wood planks, has a fantastically inventive live band that plays the music and the sound effects, and sings with actors who switch costumes, make-up and character faster than you can say “commedia dell’arte.”

The Robbins-directed “Good Woman” has all these, and more: a play that arguably marks the pinnacle of Brecht’s powers, and a passionate political core that serves as bedrock, not soap box.

More than anything, this is Brecht as Brecht wanted it: for the masses. Robbins is aiming for emotional directness, but within a ritualistic style. He remembers that while Brecht’s Theater of Alienation was about the alienation Out There, it was also about humanizing the audience In Here.

Brecht fills his imaginary Chinese city (and the heavens above, home to three devious gods) with so much injustice, that justice is precious. Forced to embody and confront both, Shen Te (Shannon Holt), is a prostitute blessed with monetary providence and unable to control her instinct for charity. Neither Brecht nor his English translator, Eric Bentley, who collaborated in neighboring Santa Monica, spell out how Shen Te becomes Shui Ta, her wily “cousin” who knows how to run a business.

Holt and Robbins have come up with their own solutions, adding haunting, psychological dimensions that the text only hints at. It begins with simple, powerful costume changes, and one of Xander Berkeley’s expressively physicalized masks which follow Dario Fo’s dictum that “the mask is not intended to mask.” It ends with a staggering acting display by Holt, becoming a good woman who dangerously tests her moral limits.

Meanwhile, Wang the water seller (Brent Hinkley) reports to the gods (the hilariously evil trio--also masked--of Jeff Foster, Dean Robinson and Michael Rivkin) on the good woman’s struggle. Hinkley plays him as a bedraggled Everyman, trying and failing miserably to befriend Shen Te. Brian Brophy’s Yang Sun wants Shen Te as a life preserver and a twisted affirmation of his maleness, with Lisa Moncure as his mother cajoling him with gleeful amorality.

Moncure typifies the dazzling artfulness here, as she switches from seedy Mrs. Yang into Shen Te’s slick landlady with invisible speed. She has a lot of company on this theatrical fast track: Foster, Robinson, Rivkin, Brophy, Jack Black, Steven Porter, Evie Peck and Tricia Parks. Cari Dean Whittemore, Kate Mulligan and Patti Tippo lead the spongers who hang around Shen Te like a bad cold.

This is theater about acting, with production gloss kept spare, yet seldom has a spare show seemed so rich. Richard Hoover’s set is a simple frame of wood ladders and platforms which Garrett Caine’s lights turn into outer space or a hellish factory.

Neal Teguns’ fine costumes are ingeniously utilitarian. Music supervisor David Robbins, with pieces by Darryl Tewes, Ernesto Salcedo, Carey Fosse and Keythe Farley, creates a vast sonic universe, from tougher-than-Weill songs to a rainstorm. These emerge from an array of instruments, some played by actors on the sidelines.

Observers may protest that, with the “Miss Saigon” storm over appropriate ethnic casting, any current “Good Woman” should boast a largely Asian cast. Robbins chose not to go that direction, which doesn’t prevent someone else from doing so. What direction he did choose has produced magic. That is what finally matters.

At 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., on Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., until Oct . 19. $10-$12; (213) 477-2055.