Pacific’s Delicious ‘Christmas Dinner’ Could Use Some Garnish

Because the Pacific Theatre Ensemble is a real company with a genuine depth of talent, it has been able to stage Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner” with a virtually different cast, director and set designer for each of the past four years (the only holdovers from previous years are actors Vince Melocchi and Sarah Zinsser). What we have this time, in fact, is a very different dinner, under Mary Seward-McKeon’s direction.

The cider and hospitality we’re served when we sit down is just as warm, but the introductory reading of Frank Sullivan’s wry “Crisp New Bills for Mr. Teagle” by Frank Collison feels a bit tepid. As we enter Wilder’s multi-generational tale of birth and death in the prosperous Bayard family, the sense of play-acting hangs over this ensemble, and it impedes the shattering sense of loss so redolent in past “Dinners.”

Wilder’s drama, moving with time machine speed through the era of the horseless carriage, demands that these fairly young actors shift from teenhood to old age with subtle ease.

Some, such as Collison and Cordis Heard, do; others, such as Synthia L. Hardy, John Furse and the velvet-throated Maggie Vaughan are fine as long as they stay young. While this saps what should be some truly stirring moments, Kevin McKeon has more than compensated with an ingeniously designed dining room wall upon which photos of the dear-departed are hung. The effect is of a gallery of the dead staring at us, and it is simplicity at its most brilliant.

“The Long Christmas Dinner,” Pacific Theatre Ensemble, 707 Venice Blvd., Venice, Thursdays and Fridays, 8:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 5 and 8:30 p.m. Ends Dec. 29. $17.50 ($2 discount with donation of non-perishable food item to Westside Food Bank); (310) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

‘Maggie Soboil Live!’ Roams Far and Wide

The solo show is always a tightrope act, but it has seldom been more so than with “Maggie Soboil Live!” at Itchey Foot Cabaret.

Soboil straddles performance forms like she straddles cultures and continents: An exile from her native South Africa, she has ventured from London to both coasts of America, and she isn’t about to pin herself down in a niche. It isn’t just that she alternates eight sketches with five songs, but that each piece differs in voice and style, sometimes radically. This can be audacious and illuminating--the theatrical equivalent of a Robert Rauschenberg collage--but Soboil’s act often feels schizophrenic.

A tone sounds set with a broad send-up of country music, “I Don’t Cry,” and an equally broad though overlong skit involving a heavy-breathing phone intruder. Then the show goes through more dips and turns than a Magic Mountain ride: tunes, with Eddie Reyes’ uninspired piano support, run the gamut of themes from Soweto freedom fighters to AIDS, and the skits careen from the light paranoia of a woman who believes Scandinavians are taking over the world to the drama of a pyromaniac. The trip is just too much for Soboil’s voice or wit, especially as she ventures afield from satire, where her heart seems to be.

“Maggie Soboil Live!” Itchey Foot Cabaret, 801 W. Temple St., Fridays, 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 27. $8; (213) 960-2096. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Cohn Gets His in ‘Closing Arguments’

Theater doesn’t want the country to forget about the McCarthy era: In the past two years, we’ve had “McCarthy” and “Millennium Approaches,” and several productions of “The Crucible.” The evil genius of McCarthy’s shenanigans, Roy Cohn, really gets his comeuppance, though, in Joel Ensana’s “Roy Cohn: Closing Arguments,” at Theatre Rapport in Hollywood.

Ensana’s Cohn is at the end of his tether, still notorious as McCarthy’s legal thug and the man who prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He’s living for his afternoon flings with young men, but dying of AIDS--and vehemently denying it to his last breath. Nothing in Crane Jackson’s performance as Cohn will make anyone forget Richard Frank’s Cohn in “Millennium”: If any performance could be termed thermonuclear , it was Frank’s. But Jackson, whose curmudgeonly moods recall actor Philip Baker Hall, excels at raging against the dying of the light.

The playwright has Cohn, in his hospital deathbed, being visited in his mind by all the key people in his life, led by his overbearing mother (the effectively smarmy Joycee Katz). It amounts to drama-as-procession, and it also presumes that Cohn would recall in a convenient chronology, despite his feverish, erratic state of mind. This dissonance is amplified by Ken Reed’s fractured, half-study, half-hospital set design, which hasn’t solved the problem of where to effectively place Cohn’s memories.

Director David Winston York also hasn’t solved the problem of how to show Cohn becoming worn and emaciated--a common side-effect of full-blown AIDS. A nattering nurse named Jules (Christopher Laurence) is another kind of problem, a too-obvious stand-in for a gay community that despises everything Cohn stood for.

“Roy Cohn: Closing Arguments,” Theatre Rapport, 1277 N. Wilton Place, Hollywood, Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Jan. 10. $14; (213) 660-0433. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

‘Bullets’ Takes Too Long Going for the Kill

T “Boy, Did I Go to the Wrong Funeral!” might easily be an alternate title for Alexander Panas’ “Bullets Are a Girl’s Best Friend”--that is, if Panas’ play hadn’t already been published.

Published too soon, based on what’s on view at Theatre Rapport. Too long by half, Panas’ three-act needs to be trimmed and trimmed and trimmed if he wants his New Orleans farce to really take off.

Director Barbara Kallir’s cast--Lawrence H. Toffler as the dashing innocent Jim wedged between Betty Porter as an alluring, possibly deadly widow and Miki Mootsey as Jim’s bayou-bred fiancee--have enormous fun with the wisecracking and high jinks.

Nobody here, though, can keep the jokes and gunplay from going terminally over the top in an Act III that even Tex Avery would say was unbelievable.

“Bullets Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Theatre Rapport, 1277 N. Wilton Place, Sundays-Mondays, 7:30 p.m. Ends Jan. 27. $10; (213) 883-1718. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

‘Panther’: From Classic Set-Up to Confusion

How does a middle-class African-American family handle the return of their long-incarcerated relative, a Black Panther Party member convicted of murder? Especially when his children, raised by their mother and grandfather, never knew him?

Sheri Bailey knows where she’s beginning with her “Walking With a Panther,” at Theatre 6470 in Hollywood. A classic set-up, though, becomes mired in confusion: Bailey is torn between condemning ‘60s excesses and serving up a romance of a radical hero’s losses.

Though Robert Alford III’s staging is rough-hewn, his actors spar with some real conviction--especially the young, materialist generation (Jadili Johnson, Paunita Nichols) vs. the elders (especially Howard Mungo as R. J. the ex-con dad). In fact, Bailey’s insights into the values debate within a black family has it all over her plot, which tries to resolve R. J.’s vile thuggery into a happy ending.

“Walking With a Panther,” Theatre 6470, 6470 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. Ends Sunday. $15; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.