STAGE REVIEW : ‘Terminal Hip’ a Rambunctious Verbal Collage

It’s hard to think of a more fitting venue for the Los Angeles area premiere of Mac Wellman’s Obie-Award-Winning monologue “Terminal Hip,” than the Soda Mug, a tiny, sweltering cafe in an obscure Venice strip of restaurants. And from its fine work with this production, it’s hard to think of a better company to stage it than the little-known four-person ensemble Bottom’s Dream.

Overturning traditional notions of what makes appropriate theater is, after all, Wellman’s stock in trade. This is the writer who said recently that “theater should be seedy, sexy and discreditable” and took on the NEA/Jesse Helms controversy in two of his plays.

His work gleefully subverts not only traditional dramatic rules of form and content but also, and particularly in this play, the very bases of how meaning is created through language.

“Terminal Hip,” subtitled “A Spectral History of America Through the Medium of Bad Language,” is a verbal collage whose found materials are the detritus of the English language as spoken in contemporary America. By combining real slang with coinages and fake expressions, Wellman points to the absurdity of colloquialism, while creating his own anarchic language in which word definitions change just as they become definable.

“Terminal Hip” started out as a poem, and certainly lends itself to hours of close reading. As a piece of theater, though, it’s a conundrum--an exercise in near-obfuscation in an art form whose essence is communication.

Performer Mitchell Gossett and director James Martin’s inspired solution is to present the work with absolute confidence, as if its meaning were perfectly clear. We may never know what “Xerox the sea at Del Mar, lose radicals their jobs and pandas their pants” means, but Gossett clearly does. His assurance allows us to relax into the piece.

Gossett rides this verbal tidal wave with the ease and mastery of a veteran surfer hanging 10. Taking his cue from the work’s title, he’s dressed like a Blues Brothers hipster and gets his point across without losing his cool. At times he’s a teacher connecting “x”s and “y”s with arrows on a chalkboard, at others a singsongy television preacher, at others still a shifty interrogator pointing a desk lamp at the audience and at his own face.

“Terminal Hip” is a great Wellman primer; it’s brief--less than an hour long--but his wordplay is infectious (panda . . . pants . . . pander? ponder? panorama?). It’s a testament to the skills of Wellman and Bottom’s Dream that we’re still pondering pandaness long after “Terminal Hip” has ended.

* “Terminal Hip,” the Soda Mug, 1009 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m. Ends Nov . 20. Tickets: $10; (310) 453-3284. Running time: 55 minutes.