Talky Portrait of Artist Frida Kahlo

“When Will I Dance?” at Pacific Theatre Ensemble dramatizes a remarkable figure: surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, who is portrayed simultaneously by two actresses psychologically representing the younger and older Frida.

In marriage, Kahlo lived, painted and suffered in the shadow of her husband, the great Mexican muralist and undying love of her life, Diego Rivera. When she died at 47 in 1954, she was largely unknown in the United States. But in recent years Kahlo has become a cult figure and the first Latin American artist whose work has brought more than $1 million at auctions.

Playwright Claire Braz-Valentine doesn’t dramatize Kahlo’s turbulent marriage with Rivera but instead reduces the stage to Kahlo emoting to herself. Julia Elliot convincingly plays the spirited adolescent Kahlo and Leticia Jaramillo renders the middle-aged, ailing figure who lived in daily pain from a streetcar accident that broke her pelvis when she was 16.

The dialogue between these alter egos (in reality a monologue) is played against reproductions of Kahlo’s anguished self-portraits which surround and haunt the tiny arena stage. Occasionally the actresses discreetly lock onto your gaze and approach your seat, talking about Kahlo’s passionate life as a Mexican, an invalid, a Communist, a tempestuous wife, and a bisexual whose lovers included Leon Trotsky and Paulette Goddard. Talk about an energetic figure.

What director Steve Markus and the playwright nicely convey is Kahlo’s self-invention, the sense of a woman who forged her physical and emotional pain into her art.

But the production’s talkiness is daunting, blurring the separation between the two personas, and the casting of the older actress is unfortunate. There’s a schoolmarm quality about Jaramillo. Her wig is unflattering, and she’s too bloodless. She catches her subject’s steely control but misses entirely the erotic tension that inspired French surrealist Andre Breton to compare Kahlo’s paintings “to a ribbon tied around a bomb.”

“When Will I Dance?” Pacific Theatre Ensemble, 707 Venice Blvd., Venice, Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. through April, plus May 2-3, 11-12, and 24. $12. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

Kelman Keeps Things Moving at Pipeline

You’re never bored at Pipeline. Scott Kelman, who directs three pieces under the umbrella title “Aleph 5,” is always in another dimension, or trying to be. He specializes in eclectic programs that have a kind of perverse quality, with weird, self-conscious titles. Another way to describe an evening at Pipeline’s Daniel Saxon Gallery is to imagine yourself swimming under water.

The work is creative and it has form. Ringmaster Kelman himself displays nimble feet as a gross Pied Piper of a casino emcee in the show’s Mafia-and-Nuclear Bomb-inspired one-act “Las Vegas, The Odds on Anything.” Written by Michael Ventura, it features two devilish chorines played with a whoop by Annie Cerillo and Sigute Lownds.

A former L.A. theater critic, Tom Stringer, opens the evening as the writer and performer of “A Quiet Little War,” which he recounts with a calibrated verbal tone that’s mannered but soothing. Stringer’s solo flight through the perils of a family’s aggressive silence is a comic odyssey laced with rat poison.

But for surprise and artful effect, the sweetheart cup goes to Mary Tamaki’s “Sleepwalk.” Begowned in stunning, classical Japanese robes, and dancing like a vision from an ancient dynasty, Tamaki is an endearing sunburst of orange and gold and yellow liquefaction. The jolt when she is joined from behind a panel of screens by a pony-tailed contemporary saxophone player (Jay Green) lasciviously belting out jazz notes is stupefyingly wonderful. “Aleph 5,” 7525 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles , Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. through April, also May 5 and May 12. $9-$12. (213) 207-4380. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Too-Cute Profile of Alzheimer’s Care-Giver

Maria O’Brien directing debut is a highly personal choice in the romantic dramedy “Home Games,” at the Whitefire Theatre. She was a care-giver to her father, actor Edmond O’Brien, when he was dying of Alzheimer’s disease, and that’s the same problem the adult daughter faces in “Home Games.”

Playwright Tom Ziegler’s three-character play is not about Alzheimer’s exactly, but the point is the same: the conflict, the guilt, the need and destructive dependency involved in caring for an incompetent parent.

The trouble with the play is that it’s too frisky and cute for its theme to have much impact. The mentally handicapped father (Richie Allan) is such a lovable, colorful Damon Runyon character, living in the glow of the ’55 Yankees on which he was a third-string catcher, that you neither take him nor his daughter with any degree of empathy or pain until the play’s almost over.

What you’re left with is an old-fashioned patented romance between the noble, sacrificing daughter (Sharon McCreedy) and a rich, love-smitten boyfriend (David Elliott) who tempts her to live life for herself.

McCreedy and Allan are one-dimensional as denizens of the Bronx. Elliott in a tougher role steals the acting honors; it’s not easy to be a straight romantic leading man who must play off two characters buzzing around him like human Frisbees.

At the end, the daughter’s dependency on the father is sentimentalized and you want to strangle them both. The playwright tries to create both an entertainment and socially relevant theater and comes up short on both ends, dragging this game into extra innings. But the ballpark sound design by Leonora Schildkraut is a four-bagger. “Home Games,” Whitefire Theater, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends June 2. $12.50-$15. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Carrie Dobro a Triple Threat at the Play Box

Fantasies can be theatrical if they’re short enough and feature an outrageous performer, which is precisely what you get in “Summer Snow” at the Play Box Theatre.

New York actress Carrie Dobro makes a tour de force, all-stops-out West Coast debut playing triple vamps: a haughty English sophisticate, a Latina chica and Hell’s Angels Poster Girl done up as a dead ringer for Miss Elvira, and a goldilocked French temptress.

Dobro is mercurial and clever, a chameleon who brings craft and sexiness to playwright Maurice Keller’s shaggy dog play about a romantically confused husband trapped in a motel room when his female fantasies visit him 1-2-3-justlikethat , popping out of his bathroom onto his bed.

Martin Clark’s sexist husband, who thinks foreign women are exciting, is a tad morose and charmless--a danger when the theater is so small the actors and patrons breath on each other--but director John Drayman keeps things moving. “Summer Snow,” the Play Box Theater, 1955 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends May 5. $15. (213) 465-8059. Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes.