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Kevin Kling’s ‘Lloyd’s Prayer’ Looks for Meaning, Miracles

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Taken as a bunch, American playwrights get pretty itchy when it comes to a deus ex machina like an angel dropping down from heaven. Kevin Kling, if we’re to take his “Lloyd’s Prayer” as a typical work, isn’t part of the bunch. It’s the kind of play that believes in miracles, and Frederique Michel’s production at the Waterfront Stage goes a fair distance in realizing Kling’s deliberately naive style.

True, Kling loses more threads of his story than a seamster out of control. But his fall-from-savagery morality tale, involving a wild child (John Blevins) who was named Bob by his crazy adoptive parents (Sherry Landau and Bill Moynihan) and befriended by Lloyd, a flimflam man (Patric Zimmerman), stands securely in the Southern literary tradition of off-center folks looking for meaning in a mad universe.

Once Bob climbs down from the trees (on a spare but panoramic Charles Duncombe set), he sure goes through the ringer with humans, eventually serving as Lloyd’s “beast boy” in self-styled religious revivals. Fortunately, this isn’t another of those trite myths in which the animal nature teaches wisdom to the civilized. But Bob is so low-key, as Blevins plays him, that he’s almost blown away by the delicious character switching of Landau (especially her angel) and Moynihan, as well as Zimmerman’s Lloyd, a man too lost to know when he’s touched by grace.

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“Lloyd’s Prayer,” Waterfront Stage, 250 Santa Monica Pier, Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Runs indefinitely. $12.50; (213) 393-6672. Running time: 2 hours.

Attic Theatre Walks on the Wilder Side

If “A Wilder Evening” does anything, it reaffirms that Thornton Wilder was the strangest of artists: a modernist with antique concerns. Joseph Culp’s production, at the Attic Theatre in Hollywood, while essential only for Wilder aficionados, certainly reflects the author’s two-sidedness.

According to an Attic representative, the Wilder estate has never before received--let alone granted--a request to stage four of Wilder’s earliest, so-called Three-Minute Plays. Not surprising, for the titles say everything about their studied seriousness, spiritual devotion, medieval taste and total unplayability: “The Angel That Troubled the Waters,” “Now the Servant’s Name Was Malchus,” “Hast Thou Considered My Servant, Job?” and “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead.” Even Howard Schechter’s introductions as a stage manager (in a nod to “Our Town”) do not clear the muddiness of these tales about Jesus, faith and sacrifice.

Sandwiched between these are, by contrast, two of Wilder’s last one-acts--”Infancy” and “Childhood.” Here, the “Our Town” connection is direct, especially in the neglected kids’ make-believe travels in “Childhood” with a bare stage, chairs and a reflective sense of mortality. Again, though, Wilder’s stilted prose can’t be overcome by an earnest--no, gutsy--cast.

“A Wilder Evening,” Attic Theatre, 6562 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 18. $10; (213) 462-9720. Running time: 2 hours.

Hey, Elaine May Was a Playwright Too

Before Elaine May became Hollywood’s favorite comedy script doctor and a woefully underappreciated filmmaker--and after she broke up with sidekick Mike Nichols--she scribbled a few plays. Her 1962 “Not Enough Rope,” the first of a pair of Joe Holsen-directed one-acts at the Zephyr Theatre, combines the broad, fast Nichols- May badinage with the strong irony of her films-to-be.

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It’s crude, and Jim Arsenault, as a drummer whose practicing is interrupted by an apartment neighbor (Madeline Till) trying to hang herself, appears to be doing his role by rote. But Till is frenetically fine, recalling no less than Elaine May.

One hopes that playwright Robert Mearns has more to say on male friendship than he does in “Now Departing.” He tills the over-tilled soil, in the era of De Niro and Scorsese, of young Italian-American men trying to make sense of their lives and their women. After Tommy (Gregg Tome) and Frank (Robert Gantzos) verbally tussle over whether Frank’s flame is worth flying to another city for, they decide that she isn’t.

Is this maturity? Cowardice? Mearns seems not to know, and Tome and Gantzos, all behavior and no acting, are no help either.

“Not Enough Rope” and “Now Departing,” Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 21. $10; (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

A ‘Much Ado’ That Needs a Pick-Me-Up

A masterpiece of mercurial moods, Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” is an open field for a director. So Robert Cohen’s approach at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills--love and deception among decidedly mature adults at Leonato’s Messina manse--is perfectly valid (Cohen’s staging first appeared at the 1989 Utah Shakespeare Festival).

In fact, the slowed-down, even melancholic pace--amid set designer Douglas-Scott Goheen’s world of woods and aging elegance, and supported by Joel Kabakov’s chamber score and Angela Balogh Calin’s fine late-19th-Century costumes--puts us in Chekhov’s provinces. Again, a good idea.

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There is such a thing as too slow, though, and this “Much Ado” sometimes needs a dose of Geritol. Cohen’s actors know what they’re doing: Mary Ellen invests her Beatrice with plenty of world-weary cynicism; David Hunt Stafford pokes mild fun at Benedick’s reluctance to move from the comic commentator’s position on the sidelines into life’s main event. Still, the requisite fiery chemistry just isn’t palpable, and the matchmaking fights go through the paces rather than demand our urgent attention.

The Hero-versus-Claudio debacle, which lifts what could have been a standard comedy into a higher realm, is only mildly impassioned in Deborah Seidel’s and Kevin Bash’s hands. Like Goheen’s upstage gallery of tree photos, these tugs of war come at us attractively made up, but once removed.

“Much Ado About Nothing,” Theatre 40, Beverly Hills High School, 241 Moreno Drive, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends Sept 8. $14-$17; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

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