Narita’s ‘Tiger’ Is Released From the Lab Too Soon

After her endlessly fascinating one-woman show, “Coming Into Passion/Song For a Sansei,” and a nervy performance as Hedda Gabler at East West Players earlier this year, it was difficult to gauge where writer-actress Jude Narita would go next. The titular answer, “The Tiger on the Right/The Dragon on the Left,” is at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood.

The deeper answer is that Narita is in transition, along with her four fellow Asian-American writer-actresses. Because “Tiger” emerged out of Narita’s workshop in which the writer is also the performer, it carries the mixed burdens and blessings of the lab process. To wit: Many of the evening’s 15 scenes barely register an impression, while a few galvanically fuse the personal and the artful.

Lauren Tom’s “Helen Dare,” among the few, introduces us to a thoroughly unlikely character, an ever-frowning Chinese woman who relates her wildly circuitous route to the American Dream. Another emigre’s tale, Narita’s “Strong Heart,” evokes with tender, passionate care the wrenching losses of a Cambodian woman.

But more care, and time to develop, is just what is needed with most of this collection. Patty Toy’s auditioning actress, Szu Wang’s hip L.A. woman, Michelle Emoto’s youngster tired of being told what to do and Narita’s jilted lover form a gallery of types we know all too well. Even staler are comic bits spoofing “Charlie’s Angels” and, yes, rap (already a multiculturalist cliche). A grimmer piece, like Tom’s overacted, Genet-inspired “Song of Songs,” feels trapped in its own modern dance flailings. George Abe chimes in with quiet music support in most of the scenes, which have generally been let out of the lab too soon.

“The Tiger on the Right/The Dragon on the Left,” Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends July 27. $10; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes.

‘Spirochete’ Is Recycled News

“Newspaper Theatre.” The name given to the topical work developed by the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project cuts two ways: It lives on urgency, and then it’s bird-cage liner.

Today, of course, we recycle our newspaper, which is what Strike Theatre has done with the Federal Theatre Project’s and Arnold Sundgaard’s “Spirochete,” at the Heliotrope Theatre in Hollywood. (Even the program comes as a four-page tabloid daily.) In 1938, the topic of “Spirochete” was syphilis (the title comes from the disease’s worm-shaped micro-organism), but the concern was ignorance, fed by prudery and/or hypocrisy. In 1991, even though syphilis is on the rise again, we think “AIDS.”

But before “Spirochete” is over, we’re also thinking that there must be a better way of dealing with the issue. It may seem clever to go retro in order to tackle a hot topic, but not when this particular bit of theatrical newspaper isn’t worth recycling.

Director Joshua D. Rosenzweig encourages his young ensemble to stress the broad, primary colors of a vast array of characters we follow (along with a pair of fresh-scrubbed but know-nothing fiances) through the history of syphilis. This neo-Brechtian approach, with presentational address, echoes the Actors’ Gang, but with little of that group’s firm grasp of a style that can be a cartoon but must never be cartoonish.

More fatally, though, Sundgaard’s material is so generally humorless that a cartoon approach seldom fits. Sundgaard’s doctors go nuts every time they think they’ve made a breakthrough, which could have been a very funny way to jab the medical establishment, but it just gets fatiguing by repetition. And when the play really gets earnest in its melodramatic passages, actors more at home in a commedia or vaudeville vein feel out of sorts. Two who don’t are Grant Heslov as the eternal syphilis patient waiting for a cure, and Allan Kolman as a doctor and a hard-luck working man.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that the Federal Theatre Project could have come up with the inventive set pieces that designer Kevin Adams (aided by Mark Wendland’s costumes) arranges here like rabbits out of a hat.

“Spirochete,” Heliotrope Theatre, 660 N. Heliotrope, Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends July 14. $12; (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Three One-Acts Are ‘Here Today . . .’

Boy, did Timothy C. Burns ever get it right with the umbrella title of his three one-acts: “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.” It’s hard to remember when such ephemera landed on as promising (and promising-looking) a stage as the reincarnated Met Theatre in Hollywood. The Met has always been about plays, not lint.

The opener, “Talk Is Cheap,” with Charles Cyphers and Robert Ballew as two good ol’ boys in a bar, is an indicator of things to come. The joke is that these guys can only speak in truisms (“Nothin’ lasts forever”), only we get the joke long before the scene winds down. (Incredibly, playwright Burns, with director Brendan Burns, thought the scene so ingenious that it’s reprised later in a very different but no funnier context.)

In the rogues’ gallery of plays stereotyping the homeless, “Spare Change” deserves a special place of dishonor. Lee deBroux, cast as the “Inebriated Gentleman,” is asked to spout one hackneyed line after another, including, believe it, the oldest, bad-taste alcoholic one-liner in the book: “I used to have a drinking problem myself.” A “Well-Dressed Gentleman” (Tom Kindle), waiting for a bus, somehow feels compelled to divulge his worst family problems to his new-found friend. There isn’t a true moment in the dialogue.

The finisher, “Moments Alone,” feels like Burns’ idea of some kind of tour de force: The playwright himself plays a man so hurt by a break-up with his longtime girlfriend (Elizabeth Reilly) that he escapes into a fantasy of himself as an Italian, then French, then Swedish gigolo, only to take the fantasy literally. Reilly, trying to patch things up in the sleazy restaurant where they broke up, hardly recognizes him.

This kind of situation has to be grounded in character, but Burns’ man undergoes the sort of arbitrary sea-changes that only a puppetmaster, or playwright, could manage. He is never his own man, so it doesn’t matter what happens to him. So much for breaking Rule 1 of good comedy.

“Here Today, Gone Tomorrow,” Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends July 17. $10; (213) 957-1152. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

‘Mother’: Earthbound Spiritual Rite

Nigerian playwright-director Nkeonye Nwankwo’s “Earth Mother,” at Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles, means to be more an incantation or prayer than a play, but even as a spiritual rite it is woefully Earth-bound.

Instead of the transformative magic of Earth Mother (the statuesque Cassandra Brown) returning to her land raped by toxic waste and senseless war, there is only Connie Johnigan’s creaky choreography. Instead of an emotional basis for the peasant’s plight, there is stilted preaching. Instead of juicy conflict between the powers-that-be and nature incarnate, there are dry intonations of hope and fear.

The Earth deserves better.

“Earth Mother,” Inner City Cultural Center, Los Angeles. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays,3 p.m. Ends July 28. $15; (213) 387-1161. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.