Affairs--Extramarital to Iran-Contra--Take Stage

Bill Sterritt pays homage to two of his favorite dramatists--Luigi Pirandello and Noel Coward--in “Modern Drama,” opening Tuesday at the Zephyr Theatre in West Hollywood.

“I was always a fan of both of them, and wondered what would happen if I threw the two together,” says the playwright. Mixing real and surreal characters, Sterritt focuses on the strained marriage of writer Crocker Morton and his 10-year-younger wife Hillary. Twelve years before, during their honeymoon in England, Hillary had an affair--and to get back at her, Crocker wrote a play about it.

Since then, the mega-success of that play, “Table Manners,” has been a lingering, enervating reminder of Hillary’s infidelity--as has the constant physical presence (seen only to Crocker and the theater audience) of the characters he created in “Table Manners”: the autobiographically inspired Mr. and Mrs. Rosdale, an Italian gardener and a French maid, all of whom have taken up residence at the Mortons’ Cape Cod home.

“It’s about the cages people construct for each other,” explained Sterritt, whose “Caribbean Romance” was recently awarded second prize in South Coast Repertory’s 1992 California Playwriting Competition. “Instead of letting each other in, they lock the door.”

Also opening this month:

Tuesday: Aaron Sorkin’s courtroom drama, “A Few Good Men,” comes to the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills. Michael O’Keefe, Alyson Reed and Paul Winfield star in the Broadway hit, based on the 1986 Guantanamo Bay murder of Marine Pvt. William Santiago.

Tuesday: Karen Loftus and Joan Ranquet offer their perspective in the two-woman show, “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World,” playing one night only at Cafe Largo in West Hollywood.

Wednesday: “Mastergate,” Arthur Kopit’s take on the Iran-Contra Senate hearings, has a two-night reading in L. A. Theatre Works’ “The Play’s the Thing” series at the Santa Monica Guest Quarters Suite Hotel. In the cast: Ed Asner, John Randolph, James Whitmore and JoBeth Williams.

Thursday: “Deb and Dan’s Show,” an original theater piece by and with husband and wife Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer Simpson) and Deb Lacusta, premieres at Club Lux and at the Santa Monica Airport.

Friday: “The Carbonell Sisters from Havana,” Raul de Cardenas’s comedy about four sisters living in Havana circa 1949, is the maiden production of C. A. R. I. B. E., offering separate performances in Spanish and English at the Chapel Court Theatre, located in the Hollywood First Methdist Church.

April 16: Rex Weiner’s “Be Bop a Lula,” a new stage drama about legendary ‘50s rockers Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, comes to Theatre/Theater in Hollywood. Producing are musicians Adam Ant and John Densmore.

April 16: The comic goings-on of a Broadway opening-night party set the stage for Terrence McNally’s “It’s Only a Play” at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood. The cast includes Eileen Brennan, Keene Curtis, Zeljko Ivanek, Dana Ivey and Charles Nelson Reilly.

April 21: Armed with actual scripts of past shows, “The Real Live Brady Bunch” (at the Westwood Playhouse) breathes stage life into America’s squeakiest-clean TV family of the ‘70s.

April 22: Life in modern-day Moscow is the subject of Yuri Trifonov’s “Exchange” (translated and adapted by Michael Frayn), making its American premiere as part of the L. A. Theatre Works play-reading series at the Santa Monica Guest Quarters Suite Hotel.