STAGE REVIEW : ‘Tripping’ Stumbles Over Trivial Matters

It isn’t that one is offended by the sex jokes or the drug jokes or the occasional wrong grammar or the mispronunciation of Gauloises , the French cigarettes that Sarah finds so sexy to smoke in Paris. Not really.

What is such a grind in Susan Rubin’s “Sarah’s Story: Tripping on the Belly of the Beast,” which has dimly reopened Theatre 4 at the former Los Angeles Theatre Center, is the endless tripping on absolutely nothing we could care much about.

We are given the accumulated trivia of one hopelessly confused American life, circa 1969, with its deadly details spilled all over a bare, black stage, illuminated by a few gorgeous prints (the worthwhile part) and brought to us through a concatenation of “and thens.” Spoken or not.

Rubin has written what feels like a thinly veiled autobiography about a college graduate named Sarah who trips gaily from misdemeanors to felonies, Brandeis to Paris (via the theft of a truck), where she takes ballet class at the Ecole Beethoven and opens a hash parlor “and salon” with a Buddhist friend. Isn’t that what’s expected of every red-blooded American teen?

But . . . news of Sharon Tate’s murder reaches Sarah as a personal insult, and her new mission in life is to trip to L.A.’s Chateau Marmont (with a pound of hash as insurance against insolvency), set up as her own private detective agency, and help the police solve the crime. In the dubious reality that follows, however, she bumps into an old boyfriend from New Jersey, now a Hollywood cop, and together they set out to rediscover the joy of sex and hamburgers.

Still with me? There is an extraterrestrial experience on the grounds of the Tate mansion, an encounter with a women’s self-help group in Oakland, more sex, more hash, more threats of nervous collapse (is it any wonder?) and a moment when Sarah marvels, believably: “A thought. I was having a thought. Why now? I had made it through four years at Brandeis without one.” Then comes the most grievous blow: news of Daddy’s “fall from power,” when he loses his business in the Empire State Building and has to go to work for his former partners. Ouch.

If you detect a trace of sarcasm, it should be self-explanatory. Unlike comedian Rick Reynolds who believes only the truth is funny and makes a good case for it, Rubin/Sarah is coy, packaged for public consumption and, at best, only pseudo-funny. She invokes sex as if she alone had invented it. And despite such respectable credentials as time spent with the Pickle Family Circus, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the American Conservatory Theatre, Rubin has built “Sarah’s Story” on shifting sand. Sarah’s are the dishonest divagations of a spoiled child on a singular ego-trip, staged with only occasional flashes of imagination by Richard Seyd.

Such self-absorbed regurgitations were once reserved for the therapist’s couch and the therapist was paid to listen, not the other way around. Letting it all hang out can be processed into art. It should not, raw and unvarnished, be mistaken for art.

“Sarah’s Story,” a pilot project of the Women Artists Group, is presented by Indecent Exposure and is the first show to be co-sponsored by the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles, now in charge of bookings at the Spring Street complex that formerly housed the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

It does not bode well.

“ Sarah’s Story: Tripping on the Belly of the Beast,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., downtown. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Indefinitely. $13-$15; (213) 466-1767). Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.