STAGE REVIEW : A Spoof With Teeth Reopens New MET

First, let’s welcome a new old theater to town: The new MET, which involves many of the same people who were connected to the old MET and which has moved into spruced-up quarters at 1089 N. Oxford Ave. in Hollywood, former home of the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre before it split to become the Los Angeles Theatre Center. (The old MET, a creative force of the 1970s, housing about 40 seats at its tiny facility on Poinsettia off Melrose Avenue, produced some of that decade’s best local theater.)

Secondly, let’s welcome the MET’s inaugural production, a spoof with teeth called “SPEC,” written by Tom Grimes, that skewers the exploitation film business by slicing into a handful of fringe types who launder money--presumably drug money--by running it through the wash of cockamamie film projects in politically unquiet countries.

Even if the play is still raw and scattershot in its approach, Grimes is on to something. As a study of unraveling values, “SPEC” is a distant relation to Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy,” Keith Reddin’s “Life During Wartime,” Rafael Lima’s “El Salvador” and Amlin Gray’s “How I Got That Story”--all of them ironic looks at the disintegrating modern world.

Al (Robert Costanzo) is a two-bit bag of wind who’s making a career change--from lawyer to filmmaker. He’s badgering an idealistic young screenwriter named Mike (Dan Shor) into writing the perfect sex-gore-death rip-off for a low-budget flick.

“You make the script bad enough,” explains Al, “we got a monster cult hit on our hands!”

In ways that remain deliberately unclear, Al becomes associated with a taciturn character named Browner (James Gammon) and his Ivy League-ish friend Ted (Paul Gleason). They are the money bags for this movie. Browner is intentionally vague about where the money’s coming from, and Ted, who may know even less about it than Al, is only in this because Browner is “calling in” a favor. Unspecified, of course.

Browner is the mastermind, having struck up an understanding with a shady runner named Hicks (Vance Valencia) who’ll be flying stuff to and from the movie location site. It’s been a little sinister perhaps, but nice and polite so far. The satire explodes in the second act, when some sort of military coup breaks out on location--desert heat is suggested, if not spelled out--and the lines between film and reality suddenly blur.

It is part of Grimes’ point. His indictment of the movie business is hilarious but relatively benign in Act I, where Al is mostly telling Mike what he thinks successful filmmaking is all about (“I wanna do something I don’t know what I’m doin’. “). It becomes savage in the dog-eat-dog Act II, wherein Al’s all-consuming obsession with making his film is unfazed by the full-fledged armed attack. Never mind that they’re all stranded, that there is no film and that everyone is out to hoodwink everyone else as bombs fall and helicopters strafe.

Grimes, who has a distinguished young career as novelist and playwright, has drawn inspiration for “SPEC” from his own encounters with screenplay writing. He has a knack for the virulent repartee (“There’s got to be a moral underpinning to the slaughter”) and the absurdist exchange (“Do you know anything?”--”You mean about more than we already don’t know?”), but the play would benefit from greater precision. It should enhance and sharpen the comedy and perhaps inspire a proper ending. At the moment, “SPEC” stops more than it concludes.

Richard Magesis has directed with restraint in Act I and a kind of fevered hysteria in Act II. Vance Valencia’s peripheral Hicks is serviceably shady. Gammon’s Browner is coiled fury that eventually erupts (no one does this sort of thing better), and Gleason’s self-satisfied Ted is wimpishly ridiculous in the face of disaster.

Dan Shor makes the most of the bewildered, Woody Allenish Mike--a lightly penciled-in role buffeted by Al and by events around him. As Al, the funniest and most vivid of the characters, Costanzo is a garrulous bull in a china shop, who speaks in catch phrases and has a blissful way of not hearing a single contradiction he utters. He seemed to be having trouble with lines from time to time at Wednesday’s opening, but was enough of a pro to make it part of the act--even handling the sudden collapse of a chair from under him with humorous equanimity.

A key player in this production is set and lighting designer Louis Mawcinnitt, once a fixture at the Company of Angels, who has been away from Los Angeles theater for much too long. His second act special effects are a knockout.

At this juncture, “SPEC” feels more like a work-in-progress than a finished product, but it’s the kind of play and production that tells us this theater means business. The departure of the old MET was a distinct loss to the community. It’s good to welcome it back.

* “SPEC,” MET Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. Wednesday-Sundays, 8 p.m. New cast starts June 2. $15; (213) 957-1152. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

‘SPEC’

Robert Costanzo: Al

James Gammon: Browner

Paul Gleason: Ted

Dan Shor: Mike

Vance Valencia: Hicks

A MET Theatre presentation in association with “SPEC” Productions. Producers Tom Bower, James Gammon, Paul Koslo. Director Richard Magesis. Playwright Tom Grimes. Sets and lights Louis Mawcinnitt. Costumes Kerry Daggett. Sound Randy Perry. Stage manager Mark Burnham. Assistant stage manager Brenda Smith.