‘Your Houses’: An Election-Year Gem

“Both Your Houses,” Maxwell Anderson’s withering attack on graft and corruption, has risen from the Depression to enliven 1992 politics with a crackling revival by Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills.

Here’s a play written in the waning months of the Hoover Administration, unveiled on Broadway during FDR’s first months in office and lambasted as a “propaganda play” before sweeping to a Pulitzer Prize. Has it faded with time? Does it hold up?

Take out the period buzz words--i.e., “Nevada Dam,” “Communist,” “Ohio Gang”--and there’s not a line that doesn’t ring with relevance. In this election season, “Both Your Houses” (from “A plague o’ both your houses,” in “Romeo and Juliet”), is a timely, political drama lit up by thieves and liars too human to be mere clowns or villains.

Crisply directed by Michael Arabian and performed with wit and savagery by a polished 12-member cast, the production races along with an urgency that even two intermissions can’t slow down. Crucially, the play’s anger is not mean-spirited.

Set inside Washington’s House Office Building, the gray and mahogany set is basically featureless. But the characters are such a band of brigands, they turn a formal hearing room into a boiler room.

The greenhorn/idealist/hero (convincingly earnest Marcus Smythe) anticipates “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” The crooked pols he attempts to defeat at their own game range from cynics who revel in their fat pork barrels (florid, genial William Frankfather) to conscience-stricken congressmen too weak to rise above the muck (dapper Jay Bell as the besieged Committee Chairman).

The characters and their foibles may be generic but the production, which has everything but a House Banking scandal, is animated by its wheeler-dealers--among them, Katherine Henryk’s arch and nasal secretary, Robert Nadder’s silken party whip and Will Nye’s greedy public servant.

“Both Your Houses,” Theatre 40, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills High School campus, Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m., Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 13. $14-$17. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

‘Snapshot of Jesus’: Amazing Achievement

A dramatic monologue about an adolescent’s immersion in the Pentecostal movement, “The Amazing Miracle Snapshot of Jesus” is a beguiling and gently funny solo performance at Theatre/Theater.

San Francisco writer-actor Reed Kirk Rahlmann dramatizes a naive Pentecostal recruit while simultaneously interpreting the youth’s spiritual odyssey with a distancing, reportorial eye.

Rahlmann and director Chris Brophy create a deceptively crafted work that gives the offhand impression that you’re listening to some guy bending your ear in a bar or a coffee shop.

And what a tale he has to tell--lured out of boredom to a Pentecostal youth meeting at age 15, singing and praying in jubilant rallies, struggling with church rules against kissing girls, going to movies and other secular distractions, frustrated that he can’t talk to God like those around him until finally he shakes himself into a frenzy and bursts into speaking in tongues with the Divine One.

Rahlmann’s escape or awakening two years later is dispassionately rendered. Laughs at the expense of the Pentecostals are rife, of course, but it’s soft laughter, not snide or superior. In fact, the absence of sarcasm elevates the material. Quite an achievement.

“The Amazing Miracle Snapshot of Jesus,” Theatre/Theater, 1713 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 28. $10. (213) 469-9689. Running time: 1 hour.

‘The Castle’ Delivers a Long, Wearying Tale

You don’t see many plays set amid the Crusades in 12th-Century Europe. In British playwright Howard Barker’s “The Castle,” the squalor of the Middle Ages is a metaphor for the moral pathology of capitalistic society.

The theme is intriguing, but this production at the Wooden-O Theatre in West L.A. is stylistically excessive, harsh, frequently ear-splitting, brutalizing to the central nervous system. Ahhh, but that’s the abrasive point. Barker, who’s a controversial figure in Europe, wouldn’t have it any other way.

Russell DeGrazier’s visceral staging (the stark set designed by Jim Barbaley) centers on exhausted warriors returning home from the Holy Wars only to find that their old society has turned into a matriarchy. Sexual anxiety rends the air.

A wife’s transformation dismays her warrior husband (elegant Sarah Gossage and crazed Steve Breaker). A village witch (Jennifer Karr) hikes up her raggedy dress and hurls herself at men. A hypocritical priest (Jeff Jeffcoat) intones Scripture, a character is disemboweled and a shackled architect (John Worful) builds a castle, the stage ringing with clanging pipes and hammered steel.

Brushed with contemporary references and images, ominous music (Darin Lane Morris) and gloomy lighting (Dietrich Juengling), the experience gradually wears you down--the sum of the parts more grueling than gripping and finally even numbing.

“The Castle,” Wooden-O Theatre, 2207 Federal Ave., West L.A., Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept. 5. $15. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

Something’s Missing From ‘Another House’

Written in response to a terminal illness in his own family, Nick Salamone’s “Another House on Mercy Street,” at the Off Ramp Theatre, is an acutely felt second act dearly in need of a first.

The cheerful marriage of a young couple (Deana Payne and Adam Reeves) is thrown into disarray when the wife, once sensual and frolicsome, is struck with multiple sclerosis. The tumultuous effects of this change consume the second act under the deft direction of Joshua Perl.

The wheelchair-bound Payne subtly modulates her deterioration, progressively twitching into complete helplessness while her mind remains alert. The act is also propelled by the husband’s growing awareness that he can’t keep up his sunny facade forever, an abrupt mood swing nicely gauged by Reeves.

The play would be stronger yet if the first act were not squandered on the banalities of cute young lovers, almost Dick and Jane types, settling into their first apartment with crude interruptions from her fussy and tiresome mother (Cheryl Carrington). Since the characters seem one-dimensional through most of the first act, the play’s plunge into withering adult drama is more bathos than pathos.

“Another House on Mercy Street,” Off Ramp Theatre, 1913 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 13. $12-$14. (213) 653-8756. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Logic Links Disparity in Guare’s ‘Landscape’

John Guare’s farce/tragedy “Landscape of the Body,” about a woman from Maine who finds dementia and murder in the big city, is unevenly cast in a maddening production at the Complex.

Co-directors Nicholas Ippolito and Jennifer Macfadden capture the musical play’s fragmented, unconventional staging but miss the deep laugh in Guare’s urban paranoia. This is a serious farce that blends wacko characters and violent incident with the utterly ordinary, but the result is disjointed instead of the crazy quilt Guare intended.

As overwritten as the work is, a logic binds its disparate elements. Among these are masked mime executioners, a brain-fried teen killer (Ippolito), a stressed-out mother (Macfadden) suspected of murdering her 15-year-old son (Daniel Beers) and a dead chanteuse who lushly sings Guare’s songs with the cold formality of a lounge hostess in the Big Sky (glimmering Sallie Liesmann, whose performance inadvertently steals the show).

“Landscape of the Body,” the Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8:30 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 6. $10. (213) 913-0777. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.