STAGE REVIEW : ‘Epic Cycle’ Takes Maleness to Task

The good movies have all been made, and the rest of life is just a holding action. If you accept that--and there’s a fairly good case made for it in Dan Zukovic’s comedy, “The Epic Cycle,” at the Wooden O in West Los Angeles--then you might come out feeling that this is one play sent from the gods.

Of course, it was “The Gods” that those big, sprawling biblical epics were trying to get rid of, in favor of “God.” Zukovic’s screenwriting security guard deeply misses them, and, at the Beverly Hills condo he monitors during the graveyard shift with his musclebound, vaguely Slavic colleague, Nikbin (Richard Vidan), life seems rather God-less.

In place of some deific order, Singer and Nikbin do many small things and talk much small talk to fill up the time. But this isn’t banter in the manner of so many actor workshop-designed comedy dialogues posing as plays. There is a strangely dramatic sense of suspension to Zukovic’s scenes, as if something really were about to happen, and you had better be ready for it . This, plus Andrew Tsao’s edgy, blackout-punctuated direction, lets fly an unspoken message that hovers over the action: The next few minutes may be your last.

When The End appears to have come, alas, neither Zukovic nor Tsao can rescue it from being slightly silly (Philip Esposito plays his double-breasted Eurotrash visitor as a man who’s impossibly sex-crazed). But in a world after Bible epics, there are no Ends, just long waits to punch the clock.

In the meantime, the Singer-Nikbin night duo is a great way to pass the time. Nikbin, so clogged with steroids that he must make emergency runs to convenience stores for large quantities of carbohydrates, returns with “many objects fried in the fat of four-legged animals” and hands Singer a “bucket o’ coffee.” They feel hilariously once-removed from their surroundings, saying things like “such is the life of a nighttime security guard.” They might even be “cast” by somebody with an eye for Laurel and Hardy contrasts: Singer, the pencil-necked geek, and Nikbin, a burly innocent who feels at war with the world and calls Charlton Heston “the last man.”

“The Epic Cycle” is really one big joke about maleness, and Vidan and Zukovic are completely tuned in to the joke (Vidan, though, has to work on his accent, which he loses when he gets angry). It may be that the joke goes on a touch too long, but you have to chuckle speculating that perhaps Zukovic wrote this while he himself was waiting out those long meaningless nights at a big desk in a big lobby and wondering where all the good movies went.

“The Epic Cycle,” The Wooden O, 2207 Federal, West Los Angeles, Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept. 28. $10; (213) 477-2938. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.