A Crackling, On-the-Mark Revival of ‘Raisin’

“A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s personal drama of a family’s struggle for dignity, blazed a path for black theater when it was staged on Broadway in 1959. But the play has fallen into theater’s dustbin in recent years, considered too predictable and melodramatic, and Mama’s couch scene was even parodied in “The Colored Museum.”

So it’s nice to see that a new company, Desmond Productions, has revived a sterling production of “Raisin,” one of the very best you’re likely to see anywhere, at the Complex in West Hollywood. Hansberry’s family, squeezed into a cramped Chicago flat (well-designed by Bill Wilday and Tricia Wilson), is genuine even when characters fall to their knees or gnash their teeth.

Such control points to the strong direction of Terrance D. Murphy, who has so fine-tuned this play that the near three-hour running time breezes by with alacrity.

The actors click like an ensemble despite the fact that this is a play scattered with individual star turns. These actors are really at home with one another, inhaling the same stale air and deferred dreams that propelled Hansberry to Greenwich Village.

The nine-member cast is powered by Denise Dowse’s tough/tender matriarch Lena Younger. Her money-hungry son and homemaker daughter-in-law (the texture-rich Desi Bullock and Marlynne Frierson) crackle with tension. But the rebellious impulses of the medical school-bound daughter (Adriene Bausley) suggest a girl who lives in Baldwin Hills instead of Southside Chicago.

Al Noble, as the shamed bearer of horrendous news (about stolen inheritance money), hides his unspeakable burden with the droop of a shoulder, and Louis A. Shapiro, as an obsequious white racist, is also squarely on the mark.

“A Raisin in the Sun,” the Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Thursdays - Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Dec. 15. $7-$10; (213) 464-2124. Running time: 3 hours.

A Double Dose of Substance Abuse

Bar-room plays have been around so long that it takes a leap of imagination to make them work.

Robert Shaw’s booze-drenched one-act, “Drunk in the Arms of Jesus,” directed by Dennis Redfield at the Lex Theater, is a diamond of the lower depths. It’s not only fresh but its absurdity is laced with a seductive metaphysical fascination.

Enlivening this squalor are three drunks and a morose bartender who plunk you to the bottom of the bottle. As two skid row philosophers who have raised denial to a new art, the scruffy Martin Beck and Charles Hyman appear like characters out of a pipe dream co-authored by Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett.

Drunks aren’t easy to play. And it’s almost impossible for an actor to give a creative spin to a slobbering inebriate, but the bulky Hyman with the bird’s nest hair and the mousy Beck are both comical and strangely appealing.

They keep ranting on about their dubious friend Fred and when Fred shows up, he’s 10 times worse off than they are in a performance by Nathan Hamilton that is riotously self-destructive.

The clothes on these guys actually make you queasy. Redfield and his cast took big gambles and won.

“Caffeine Society,” by Jill Maynard, is the recovery part of the evening’s substance-abuse cycle in a neat shift of focus. But this play is less successful. Partly that’s because the caring, reformed drunk here (a convincing performance by Bob Mendelsohn) is a character we’ve met many times before.

Predictability qualifies the play’s momentum. More theatrical is a disheveled literary agent (a fine, burned out portrayal by Marnie Andrews), an alcoholic who’s hit bottom and comes to an AA meeting seeking help.

“Drunk in the Arms of Jesus” and “Caffeine Society,” The Lex, 6760 Lexington Ave., West Hollywood, Fridays - Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 22. $10; (213) 463-6244. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Crazed Tension Oozes in ‘One Night,’ ‘Games’

Playwright David Michael Cain, doubling as actor, exposes a crazed tension in a pair of black one-acts, “One Night” and “Games” in the matchbox-sized Back Space at Theatre/Theater.

Cain turns heightened, out-of-control situations--such as a son propping up his dead mother for an overnight visit in “One Night” or a cuckolded husband driven to sick revenge in “Games”--into bleak, tightly calibrated effects.

Cain is wired dangerously tight as the mad son in “One Night,” and Fran Montana’s frantic husband in “Games” diabolically squeezes the fates of his estranged wife (the langorous Pamela Ritke) and her lover (Gregory Niebel).

Orchestrating the squirms are directors Richard Kantor (“One Night”) and Sheila Wurmser (“Games”). Another playwright-actor in the production, Kevin Kildow, co-wrote “Games” and co-stars in “One Night.”

“One Night” and “Games,” Theatre/Theater, 1713 Cahuenga Blvd., Thursdays - Fridays, 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 20. $10; (213) 464-8938. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

‘Uncensored’: Topical Tidbits Lacking Focus

Any show that’s going to call itself “Uncensored: Topics of Our Time” is presuming an awful lot. In the case here, at the Fountainhead Theatre’s new home in a converted studio in West Hollywood, the menu of short plays and music is appetizing but hardly a diet that confronts lives and issues in any disturbing sense.

The social and political platter is occasionally tasty but seldom nourishing. The seven writers, three directors and 20-some actors are staging a mini-festival when they would probably be better off as artists grappling with the demands of a full-length production.

Among the seven sketches, the production has one unique and inspired number, “The Drummer/Majorette,” featuring the lighter-than-air Morgan Sheppard (the drummer) and Joan Jurige (the majorette). Its distinction is that it ignores uncensored topics, opting instead for a charm that suggests Chaplin and Fellini.

Susan Ruskin directed and also co-wrote it with Athol Fugard. A stand-up musician, Martin Sexton, is folksy and bluesy but seems to have stepped in from another play, emblematic of the production’s scattered focus.

“Uncensored: Topics of Our Time,” Fountainhead Theatre, 1110 N. Hudson St., Thursdays - Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 21. $10; (213) 962-8185. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Shaky ‘Misadventures’ Fails to Find the Magic

U-Fix the Classics, a group that reduces mythic tales to popcorn improv and audience participation games, has aimed its lance at “Morte D’Arthur” and come up with “Merlin’s Magical Misadventures.” The results, at the Attic Theatre, are not good. Lancelot and Guinevere will live, but U-Fix the Classics looks shaky. The mistake made by co-directors John MacKane and Alta P. McGovern (who also perform) was to go on at all with only a handful of people in the house. This kind of show demands a reasonable and spirited audience to keep it afloat because it can’t work on its own.

As the company struggled to survive the circumstances, the show’s winsomeness gave way to a tattered and ragged single-mindedness to get through the late hour. Incredibly, the players kept going. One of them, Mark Moriarty, is naturally funny in a Jonathan Winters sense.

“Merlin’s Magical Misadventures,” Attic Theatre, 6562 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., Fridays - Saturdays, 10:30 p.m. Ends Dec. 14. $5; (213) 462-9720). Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.