STAGE REVIEW : ‘Fear, Misery’ Needs Tinkering

Pity the poor Westsiders. But make fun of them at the same time.

Steven Wolfson tries to do both in his collection of 17 loosely connected scenes, “Fear and Misery of the Westside,” at the Complex’s Ruby Theatre in Hollywood. He also tries to invoke the idea of the angels returning to the city that was named after them, to rescue us from anomie and despair. Shades of “Angels in America”?

It’s a tall order for such a slight play and such a small production as the one staged by Julie Rifkind.

The title and the structure are adapted from Bertolt Brecht’s “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,” but comparisons end there. The struggle depicted by Brecht--of Germans coping with the tentacles of fascism in the ‘30s--is much more harrowing than the attempt of contemporary Westsiders to renew themselves spiritually.

Wolfson focuses on the affluent, depressed Angela in many of his scenes. She appears in mostly one-on-one conversations--with a friend, and then with her husband, mother, sister and two of her three kids. Angela is less vivid than her relations, which may be Wolfson’s point--she has no sense of self.

Other scenes don’t involve Angela. We meet an agoraphobic gay man and his lover, a Beverly Hills cop and a homeless man, two strangers at a gas pump, a crime-fearing paranoiac. Angels pop up in various guises, spouting poetic passages that seldom crystallize Wolfson’s themes.

Each little sketch is named after a Westside location, but a vital sense of place is missing. The set design appears to have taken its cue from the first sketch, set at City Restaurant, and doesn’t change much thereafter. A bigger-budgeted production might be able to fix this, but in its current state “Fear and Misery” remains at a workshop level, with variable performances from its hard-working cast of five.

* “Fear and Misery of the Westside,” Ruby Theatre at the Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Sunday. $7. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.