SCR’s Young Players Land on Mamet’s Planet : Stage: The playwright’s ‘Revenge of the Space Pandas’ in Costa Mesa is for a young audience but still manages to break the rules. It opens today.

Just when you think you have this liberal parenting stuff down, little Caitlin trots home from theater class and drops the bombshell.

“Guess what, Mommy! We’re doing a David Mamet!”

If you know theater, you probably choked on your Chardonnay.

Known for his acid wit and sometimes brutal dialogue, Mamet is the writer of such decidedly grown-up works as “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” “Speed-the-Plow” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Glengarry Glen Ross”--hardly the man you’d expect to pen a kids’ show. But write one he did, and, according to South Coast Repertory’s Young Conservatory director Diane Doyle, it’s a kick in the pants. Mamet’s “Revenge of the Space Pandas,” staged by SCR’s Young Conservatory Players, opens today and runs through June 16 on the Costa Mesa theater’s Second Stage.

“Pandas” features 11 graduates of the SCR’s Young Conservatory, a theater training program for children ages 6 to 17. After two years in the program, children can join the Young Conservatory Players performance troupe, which each season presents three fully staged children’s shows at SCR and the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s Founders Hall.

The troupe, founded by Doyle in 1976, often stages children’s shows that teach a lesson to young audiences. Last season’s “The Arkansaw Bear,” for example, touched on the way a young girl deals with death; this season’s “Wiley and the Hairy Man” examined how we confront our fears.

Like Mamet, “Pandas” breaks the rules.

“Right now, I think the feeling in the world is that things are kind of rough out there, so let’s not think about it,” Doyle mused. “That’s why we need a good comedy. No message, no moral, just laugh your brains out.”

“Pandas,” published in 1978, is the tale of Leonard Rudich, a.k.a. Binky, a 12-year-old whiz kid who delights in sci-fi films and gadgets. Like all geniuses, Binky must break free from the bonds of a small-minded world--personified here by a nagging, tune-touting mom--in his search for new frontiers. With the help of a homemade time machine, Binky (played by 12-year-old Tyler Morgan) and his best pals, Bob the talking sheep (Justin Walvoord, 15) and Vivian (Jennifer Kaufmann, 11), blast off to the planet Crestview, home to a legion of tie-dyed pandas, a faded matinee idol and an evil king dead-set on making a letterman’s sweater out of Bob.

Obviously, this is not typical Mamet. Or is it? As Doyle sees it, Binky may reflect a little of Mamet’s personality as a child and will strike a chord in any youngster stymied by the whims of grown-ups.

“Binky is a brilliant kid, but he has the schizy, irritating mom who keeps getting in his way,” says Doyle, an outgoing woman with an easy laugh and the energy and boffo sense of humor of your average 9-year-old. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mamet’s mom was like that. I mean, picture this: it’s the Midwest, it’s summer, and mom is downstairs cooking what? Tuna casserole. Can’t you just smell it? Barf.”

In addition, Doyle said, the script is punctuated with wry, slightly naughty Mamet-isms. There’s Edward Farpis, the aging kiddie film star who saves Bob’s hide in the show’s final moments, as well as some not-too-subtle jabs at big business. The ruthless Retainer, henchman for the supreme ruler, for example, totes an attache case wherever he goes; Crestview, its residents explain, was so named “to attract investors.”

Most of the one-hour show, however, is devoted to fast-paced zaniness that should appeal to audiences ages 6 and up, said Doyle, who solicited staging ideas from her predominantly preteen and teen-age cast members.

“The whole thing has the feeling of a B-movie,” Doyle said. “The Supreme Ruler wears a gold cape with this huge collar that comes up to his ears and looks like Ming the Merciless from the ‘Flash Gordon’ series. But the Retainer is the really nasty one. One of the kids in the cast compared him to the boys’ vice principal at school, the one you really have to watch out for.” And, of course, any good adventure has to find the heroes in at least one life-threatening situation.

“To get to Bob, the Supreme Ruler wants to whack out the kids--I like that Mamet doesn’t say kill-- with this contraption that will drop a pumpkin with all these blades on their heads,” Doyle explained. “That’s probably the most threatening thing in the play.”

Some of the show’s sillier bits were created by Doyle’s younger cast members. (The cast also includes three adults.) When Binky and company land on Crestview, for example, they encounter a pair of pandas playing the card game Go Fish.

“From the beginning, the kids and I decided that if something in the show could be off, it should be off,” Doyle said. “After all, this is another planet. So (during rehearsal), I’m thinking, ‘How can we do this in a way that’s not normal?’ I was trying to get the cast to think that way through the whole process.”

“So one of the girls said, “Why don’t we have them play with fish?’ The prop shop made us some flat fish, and it’s just hysterical. We were on the floor.”

“The Revenge of the Space Pandas” by David Mamet opens today and continues through June 16 at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Performance times today are 4 and 7:30 p.m., Sunday, 2 p.m.; Friday, 7:30 p.m.; June 15, 2, 4 and 7:30 p.m.; and June 16, 2 p.m. Tickets: $8 to $10. Call: (714) 957-4033.