STAGE REVIEW : ‘Rants’ Surpasses Showcase

At first, “Rants & Rhymes & Lies,” at Cafe Beckett, doesn’t seem to have anything holding it together except the idea that a few actors wanted to get together and put on a poetry reading--and maybe keep their chops honed between jobs.

But the collective performance of Jeanie Hackett, Ryan Cutrona, Rhonda Aldrich, Brian Mallon, Ellen Barber, Deborah Davis-Price and Lynn Ann Leveridge (other “ranters,” missing Sunday, include Viveca Lindfors and McKee Anderson) evolves to a level higher than the showcase animal.

For one thing, though verse dominates (and ranges from Shakespeare to Kate Bush), prose gloriously appears from time to time. The gifted Cutrona puts blood into an emotional passage from “Moby Dick” and gives us a tease of what he’d be like in a complete version of Harold Pinter’s “Old Times.” His fire is complemented by Davis-Price’s gentle touch in Bush’s “The Sensual World” and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”

Eventually, each actor’s personality informs--but never imposes itself--on the work, in the balanced ensemble style of the best work at the Mark Taper Forum’s literary cabaret. The program and actors vary weekly, we’re told, and the atmosphere seems fairly clear of the mavens of hip that tend to flock to L.A. coffeehouses.