STAGE REVIEW : Actors’ Gang’s ‘Klub’ Takes No Prisoners

Sooner or later, in life and theater, homelessness will kill you--a reality behind the vagabonding Actors’ Gang finally getting a roof over its head, though only for a year’s lease, at Hollywood’s 2nd Stage.

If its first show there, “Blood! Love! Madness!,” suggested that it had made the right move, then the stunning second show, “Woyzeck,” showed that the Gang had fully moved in. Now, with its third production, “Klub,” an original written by Mitch Watson and directed by Michael Schlitt, we have definitive proof of what happens when artists have time--and a home--in which to work.

The funniest irony in “Klub” is that Watson’s troupe of actor characters are trying to escape from a theater they’re trapped in: Nobody seems to know the way out, and in any case, the dictatorial director named Mike (Schlitt himself) isn’t about to show anyone the door. They’re going to have to audition their way out, based on Mike’s Draconian method of scoring points depending on the quality of the act. His cynical, chain-smoking clown-assistant, Jean Claude (Watson, of course) keeps score.

This might have been called “The Actor’s Nightmare” if Christopher Durang hadn’t taken the title first. Unlike Durang’s accountant who’s trapped in a play he doesn’t know, Watson’s actors know their lines all too well: Some have been doing them for 80 years.

Schlitt’s cast doesn’t look 80, but “Klub” is first of all far too funny and way too fast to permit quibbling over details. And besides, it’s a play that functions on a Mobius Strip sense of time and place, always cyclically wrapping around itself until we’re back where we started. After a million bad theater pieces pitying the poor actor, “Klub” cooks up some elegantly mad metaphors that declare that acting is for foolish masochists.

Mad, and also sad, a quality that might have been easy to lose in this giddy, Grand Guignol atmosphere. Dina Platas’ newcomer is achingly lost; Michael Neimand’s and Joe Grimm’s unforgettable Woodnard Brothers try so hard to get points; J.G. O’Neill’s artiste makes an art out of suicide and Jim Boyce’s Richard may be the biggest fool of all, but he’s brushing up his Shakespeare. Even Cari Dean Whittemore’s Annie--yes, of the musical--is working to get herself out of here while fending off her assistant (Teresa Jones), who’s written her own musical (David Arnott’s clever songs).

At the same time, Annie is deliciously, mercilessly lampooned (Mike tells her that she missed the auditions for “Annie Warbucks”). While “Klub,” so to speak, takes no prisoners, it makes us feel for the imprisoned--a feeling heightened by Laura Fox’s cobwebby set, David Welle’s Expressionist lights and Alix Hester’s nutty costumes.

Mike’s actors might never leave Klub; you hope the Gang never leaves 2nd Stage.

* “Klub,” 2nd Stage, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Saturdays, 8 and 10:30 p.m. Indefinitely. $7; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.