Actors Take Over ‘Story of a Family’

At first glance, “Legacy: The Story of a Family,” at the Hudson Backstage Theatre, seems to be a playwright’s play. Michele Palermo takes obvious pleasure in the crafting of traditional family drama, in the stoking of a dramatic flame burning in the hearts of the three Catalano siblings reluctantly brought together to hear their powerful father’s will.

But something interesting happens in James Paradise’s staging: As Palermo injects some unbelievable twists to keep her family trio in the same room--turning “Legacy” into just another Dirty Family Secret drama--the cast injects something much more real. Suddenly, we have an actors’ play.

It would have been easy, for example, to play brother Al and Tony as good and bad opposites--Al the upstanding grocery store owner, Tony the Vegas hustler. Instead, Fran Montano underplays Al’s virtues and suggests a not-always-admirable passivity, while Vic Trevino digs and digs into Tony’s soft underbelly, the place he feels remorse for having hurt sister Chris.

Lisa Chess’ Chris may telegraph too early the Problems to Come, but she manages the tough task of filling in an entire off-stage world that’s crucial for the play’s emotional life. There’s a lived-in intimacy among this trio--the silent ways in which body moves and eye contact melt away estrangement’s ice--that ventures beyond Palermo’s safe script.

* “Legacy: The Story of a Family,” Hudson Backstage Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Monday-Wednesday, 8 p.m. $12.50; (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

‘Unfinished Song’ Still an Unfinished Show

Here is that rare musical that eventually made it to Off-Broadway, only to be revised further on its road to . . . the Tiffany Theatre. Writer-director James J. Mellon’s “An Unfinished Song,” in its fourth incarnation, is still an unfinished show, veering indecisively between maudlin sentimentality and a tougher, more thoughtfully ironic tone. At the same time, it’s indisputably born of personal passions and an intelligent commitment to making a play that happens to be interlaced with songs.

The launching pad is a post-funeral clean-up of Michael’s apartment by his close friends: ex-girlfriend and deathbed companion Beth (a brassy, charismatic Liz McCartney), husband and wife Brad and Debbie (Ron LaRosa and Robin Taylor, both playing ditzes in an arch manner) and former lover Worth (Kevin Bailey, whose deceptively calm front contains pools of emotion).

The clean-up triggers a raft of memories, and Mellon’s schema shifts into flashback-present form--call it trite, but with some ultimately surprising rewards (and Mellon as a likable Michael). At the center is Worth’s double anger--that he never could say goodby to Michael, a gay man who died of cancer, not AIDS, and that he has to remain in the closet for his law practice (shades of Joe, the gay Mormon lawyer in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”). While his drama is solid, Mellon’s beautifully sung score pulls the show in too many directions--smart one moment, Barry Manilow-ish the next, and sometimes just silly. With cutting, this “Song” may be finally finished.

* “An Unfinished Song,” Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Indefinitely. $22.50-$24.50; (310) 289-2999. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

Male Pain in Babe’s ‘Prayer’ at St. Genesius

When it appeared in 1978, Thomas Babe’s “A Prayer for My Daughter” came in for some critical hazing (and some huzzahs) for its poetic flights of fancy in what is ostensibly a police interrogation drama. But it’s no more that than Babe’s more recent and masterful “Demon Wine” is about the underworld. It is clear in Robert Berger’s and Kevin Shaw’s staging at St. Genesius Theatre that the poetry stems from a theme too little explored by American male playwrights: The woman inside every guy.

That’s what tough-guy cop Kelly (a beautifully blustery Alan Charof) really uncovers in his and partner Jack’s (Berger) shakedown of two gay hustlers who seem to have killed an old woman. The pressure of the examination, late into the night in this Brooklyn station (Berger also did the effectively dumpy set), sometimes slackens in Babe’s script, and Louis Roth’s Sean a.k.a. Simon doesn’t come close to this character’s potential for intelligence and manipulation. But this is a production clearly striving, and often succeeding (as in Steve Wilcox’s Jimmy, a man-child torn by conflicting desires) in making flesh Babe’s heightened sense of male pain.

* “A Prayer for My Daughter,” St. Genesius Theatre, 1047 N. Havenhurst, West Hollywood. Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Indefinitely. $12-$15; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Layers of Meaning Muddle ‘Dusa, Fish’

Treat Pam Gems’ “Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi” well, and it will treat you well in return. Play around with it too much, and it will bite back.

Director Juan Valdivia’s production at the Open Fist Theatre wants to stir some quasi-improvisatory spicing into Gems’ intensely fragmented tracking of four women whose lives and life trajectories intersect like a complex geometry formula. At the same time, he has shifted the action from London to Los Angeles, while puzzlingly keeping one of the women (Paulene Smith’s overly jittery Vi) British.

The play, with its sometimes elliptical themes of maternity meeting feminism, biology meeting physics, and women trying to meet each other halfway in a world set to divide and conquer, is enough of a challenge without adding layers it doesn’t need. Blackouts between each of the play’s many, many short scenes is not a way to keep the play’s trajectories moving apace, nor is the sometimes loose, slack playing of those scenes. Martha Demson’s doomed intellectual Fish and Kathy Dunn’s mother-in-crisis Dusa suggest some of the outer world pressing down on them, but there’s nothing outer nor inner about Smith or Sherri Stone Butler’s hooker-scientist (!) Stas.

* “Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi,” Open Fist Theatre, 1625 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood. Saturdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Indefinitely. $15; (213) 882-6912. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

Women Triumph in ‘Goose and Tom-Tom’

As if the difficulties of the Gems play aren’t enough, Open Fist is also tackling David Rabe’s nearly unconquerable “Goose and Tom-Tom” on the same stage later in the week. The free-form spirit that slips into Open Fist’s “Dusa” also exists here in Dalene Young’s staging. But it fits this play’s volcanic, almost Dada-esque roundelay of wacked-out hoods, viperish women and verbal indulgences that make Rabe--if not the best American playwright--certainly the most borderline-insane.

You have to admire the drive and sheer devil-may-care attitude of Young and her cast while finally squirming through what often seems twice its 150-minute length. Part of the squirm comes from the initially funny and finally deadeningly cyclical bashing that would-be thugs Goose and Tom-Tom (Marc Sandler and Michael Denney) put themselves through. Like Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” (written soon after this, and with which it shares many themes if not a form), women rise victoriously above seemingly tough men.

But it’s a battle with few cathartic or other rewards, and Sandler, Denney and the rest of the cast are mighty worn by the time the smoke clears. If actors were soldiers, these would get some kind of medal.

* “Goose and Tom - Tom,” Open Fist Theatre, 1625 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m. Ends Jan. 8. $15; (213) 882-6912. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.