STAGE REVIEW : ‘Hysteria’ an Ironic, Comic Gordian Knot

Ah, those Gang members. If anyone understands the ritualized uses of theater, they do. What emerges from their think tank may not always be polished, but their knocking about and cobbling together is consistently raw and fresh, in all senses of that word.

The gang is the Actors’ Gang, and the latest example of the group’s communal mayhem at 2nd Stage is “Hysteria,” a wild and wily debunking of lingering 19th-Century attitudes toward and about women.

Menses, masturbation, sex, love and abortion are at the top of the list. That 19th-Century “cult of female invalidism” from which the play takes its title is the shaft that drives this engine. But where writer-director Tracy Young excels is in tying into this Gordian knot a host of ancillary issues: bulimia, birth phobias, preoccupation with youth and beauty, cross-dressing and lesbianism. The issues improbably coalesce into an ironic, fast-moving comedy with deeply serious satirical overtones.

Meet the Poindexters. Conservatives would blanch at this family’s values. There is father Bob (Ray Mickshaw), who wears skirts to demonstrate his ideas for a unisex line of corporate apparel, and there is intently youthful mother Zelda (Clare Wren), a woman as deep into denial as into cosmetics and cosmetic surgery, who hates to be called Mom (“I’m far too young to have three grown daughters”).

Her three grown daughters have their own share of quirks. Beautiful redhead Taylor (Evie Peck), a bulimic, shares Zelda’s obsession with beauty. Agoraphobic Corky (Tricia Parks) is in the grip of a fausse -pregnancy. And no-nonsense Garnet (Kate Mulligan), named after her grandmother but choosing to call herself Darby, is married to the elusive Richard.

Richard takes lots of business trips, even though Darby, more by indoctrination than conviction, spends too much time telling him how much she loves him.

A photo in an old family album triggers a time-travel encounter between Darby and her great-grandmother, the tremulous Lilymoist Teagarden (Cari Dean Whittemore). This delicate flower of Victorian womanhood is in the conflicted thrall of convention, her own libidinous urges and the team of Drs. Mills, Spills and Price.

These dedicated gentlemen (Mickshaw, Daniel Parker and Kyle Gass) will do anything to keep the second sex chaste and demure, even if it means the piece-meal removal of crucial parts of a woman’s reproductive anatomy.

Into the mix, throw Dr. Sandra Needles (Laurel Ollstein), the cosmetic surgeon who has been keeping Zelda young all these years--and a Victorian feminist named Lydia Tripplehorn (Molly Bryant), on an ardent campaign to inform women about condoms and abortion, and you have the framework for some juicy shenanigans, especially when Sandra and Lydia discover that each tops the other’s list of sexual preference.

These time travelers are cunningly intertwined by Young in a skillful script that, with the help of a few more parodies and peripheral characters, culminates in a gruesome epiphany shared by Darby and Lilymoist. In its implosion of the male-dominated Victorian barbarism that leads to this moment, and the simultaneous renewal of life in death, lies the play’s most salient and self-evident point.

In typical Actors’ Gang fashion, the acting is brisk and broadly comic, but also knows when to be skewering or tender. “Hysteria” is sprinkled also with music: one charged rap song and some spicy ballads, mostly by Gass and Young.

Costumes, ironic masks, sets and lights are strictly functional, but the astringency of the perceptions and the raucousness with which the points are driven home create a commentary of their own. Even if some tidying of loose ends is in order, there is plenty here to satisfy anyone with the appetite--one might say the stomach--for such a rich and heavy meal.

* “Hysteria,” 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Dark Dec. 21-Jan. 1. Ends Jan. 30. $10. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.