STAGE REVIEWS HOLIDAY SHOWS : Odd ‘Miracle Play’ at Oddity Theatre

The Times’ Drama Department recently visited a smattering of holiday shows open for business. Here’s a sampling of what’s in and around town .

Why stage biblical tales if, deep down, you have serious questions about them? Medieval Europeans responded to the serious mystery plays with such spectacles as “The Feast of the Ass” and “The Boy Bishop.” More recently, we had “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

You hope in the first few minutes of Blaine Steele’s “Miracle Play” at the Oddity Theatre that it’s all some kind of play-within-a-play joke--say, a dress-up show by college kids with nothing else to do over Christmas break.

But somewhere along the way on this seven-part adventure through theater hell, any hope will dissolve (for me, it was during the Cain and Abel tale, when the sibling murder looked like a bathroom accident). Only in the Job tale, not written by Steele but by Joy Ray, is there even a glimmer of wit. Otherwise, director Steele’s flat-voiced actors have to maneuver on a tiny stage cloaked in uncooperative curtains and speaking such Steele-y verse as Adam’s remark, “It doesn’t take a genius/To see that I have a penius.”

Merry Christmas.

* “Miracle Play,” Oddity Theatre, 5074 W. Pico Blvd., Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 21. $10; (213) 960-8832. Running time: 50 minutes.