Bathroom Humor of a Different ‘Level’

What a relief to watch a feminist drama that’s not only funny but unfolds without preachment.

British playwright Clare McIntyre’s “Low Level Panic,” a U.S. premiere at the Carpet Company Stage, dramatizes three obsessive, frustrated young women who share a flat in suburban London. Make that a bathroom.

You’ve heard of kitchen sink drama? This is bathtub Angst . Self-consciously overweight Jo (Kathryn Miller) spends a good deal of time shaving her legs and scrubbing in the tub. At the sink across the room, Mary (Dana Stevens) and Celia (Valerie Spencer) preen and primp before the mirror.

They’re each fluffing up in preparation for the big night out at the local dance club where, if they’re lucky, they’ll find a guy who appreciates their individuality instead of their stiletto heels.

Director Nancy Keystone’s production (underscored by Richard Tyson’s damp set redolent of tile, lotions and sprays) is the real issue-oriented, feminist thing: a stinging flesh-and-blood rebuke against sex as ritual and women as sex objects.

What’s refreshing is the indirection and irony of the writing. The characters, despite their street smarts and even past brushes with sexual violence, are unwitting victims of (unseen) male control freaks. In effect, even in moments of rebellion, they live and breathe the perfume of fantasy.

The three actresses are perfectly cast, each temperamentally different, and their British accents are inconspicuously on target.

“Low Level Panic,” Carpet Company Stage, 5262 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 27. $10; (818) 782-8869. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

A Moving ‘Window’ Into the Depression

The producers of last year’s Victorian-era drama “Lady Like” have staged a quietly compelling, Depression-era drama, Jean Van Tuyle’s “In and Out the Window” at the Tiffany Theatre.

Even before the curtain goes up, the program hurtles you into the world of the play. On the cover, a cutout window in a clapboard house looks out on a long, vanishing railroad track. Next thing you know you’re clickety-clacking on that same track in a boxcar with a young North Dakota runaway (Karl Wiedergott), a manly, protective hobo (Maxwell Caulfield) and a sprig of a frightened black girl (Lynette Lane).

The first-act action in the swaying boxcar with its huge, open back door catching the rush of the passing scenery (beautifully rendered by designer John Iacovelli) is hypnotic under Jules Aaron’s delicate direction.

In the second act, our runaway is 10 years older, back on the farm with his worn and guilt-scarred mom (a self-effacing performance by Juliet Mills) with his hobo still in tow (Caulfield’s surrogate father figure turned knightly farmer).

By now the planks of the boxcar have become the town square, where Wiedergott’s fretful young adult, long-smitten with the mysterious waif in the boxcar, finds his lost love--now a cool, self-contained woman who understands better than he the dangers and taboos of interracial romance (a fine performance by Lane who must grow from raggedy adolescent to mature melancholia).

“In and Out the Window,” Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends July 5. $15-$18:50; (310) 289-2999. Running time: 2 hours.

‘Sundays’ an Effective Look at AIDS Struggles

A few years ago plays about AIDS, besides reshaping gay theater, exercised a major social and even medical role long before movies and TV deemed it safe. Then repetition set in and gradually AIDS seemed played out, at least as advocacy theater.

One of the superior AIDS dramas, Michael Scott Reed’s “Seven Sundays,” at Theatre 40, is a reminder of how effective a play about AIDS can be when you never hear the word mentioned and when the real subject is not disease but the mutual need between two strangers--in this case, a Broadway hoofer who becomes terminal (the show’s producer, Andre Barron) and his meek, endearing hospital volunteer (Joe Dahman).

The streetwise patient and the poetic surrogate buddy are affecting characters thanks to Barron and Dahman, who deftly surmount the play’s simplistic structure and sentimental touches (i.e., teddy bears and Broadway musical routines). Set over a period of seven Sundays in the hospital room, the intermission-less play is expertly shaded by director Bruce Gray.

“Seven Sundays,” Theatre 40, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills High School campus, Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 24. $10; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Open Fist’s ‘Baal’ Gets Caught Up in Itself

All Baal wanted was to gulp down the sky and the moon. In this production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal” (the playwright’s first drama, written when he was barely 21), Brian Muir, as the titled hedonist, slurps, lusts and gorges on women as if they were grapes.

For this tumultuous play about a poet/man/child whose degeneracy swallows up those around him and finally himself, producer-director Ziad H. Hamzeh has transformed the Open Fist Theatre into an environmental wonderland (complete with flora and a purplish moat of water, designed by Tim Pulice, David Early and Hamzeh).

Audience members drink at tables in a noisy cabaret that’s part “Threepenny Opera” (with original music by John Hoover), while to the back and sides of the house the shirtless (occasionally naked) Muir brushes back his long, wet hair and fornicates in glade and forest--most heinously with pale and pregnant Donna Emet.

Of the 22 cast members, Marc Sandler impresses as Baal’s loyal follower, along with Nancy Brooks and Melissa Lechner as women who can’t resist Baal. But the production is overlong and taxes your patience with its unrelenting rapaciousness and repetitive, dreamlike dance sequences.

“Baal,” Open Fist, 1625 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood, Friday s -Saturday s , 8 p.m. Ends July 4. $10. (213) 882-6912. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

Production Shortfalls Terminal to ‘Cafe’

The solid idea behind playwright Jon Tuttle’s “Terminal Cafe” at the Zephyr Theatre is the loss of innocence in the American West as seen through the eyes of New Mexican coal miners who helped supply the Manhattan Project.

There are some excellent grimy, soot-to-the-bone portrayals in Jonathan Mittleman’s tough union leader, Richard Hawkins’ ingenuous nitwit and Jack Shearer’s gritty old man, but the promising concept is shortchanged by an uneven production.

The female characters don’t measure up. One is a cliche diner hostess, another a blank and a third, who bizarrely cracks a whip, continually bursts into the cafe shrieking after her husband in a one-note performance. The latter, played by Joan Newlin, seems at the mercy of the playwright and the director, John York. The rigid, greedy mine owner (Don Stewart) also gets mired in farce.

The play doesn’t jell.

“Terminal Cafe,” Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 24. $5; (818) 762-2381. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Triangle of Lust, Deceit in French ‘Function’

It’s resourceful of the Celebration Theatre to present the U.S. premiere of young Parisian Jean-Marie Besset’s three-character drama, “The Function.”

Nominated for a 1990 Moliere prize (the French Tony), this triangle of lust and deceit explores control and competition among a ruthless industrialist, the young woman who has an arrangement to bear him an heir, and the man’s callow young male lover.

Director John Callahan’s achievement is his multiethnic casting: the excellent Jae Ross as the wealthy magnate, the sniveling Jose A. Garcia as the insecure boyfriend and Annzella Victoria as the surrogate mother-to-be. But the Celebration is in over its head. The play seems layered with insidious Harold Pinter-like undertones. A deadly first act, which exacerbates the play’s indirection, its verbiage and stasis, kills the production.

Callahan wrings enough drama out of the second act to salvage the evening, but the experience is more intellectual than involving.

“The Function,” Celebration Theatre, 7051 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, Thursday s and Sunday s , 8 p.m. Ends July 5. $15 ; (213) 661-1952. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.