STAGE REVIEW : Festival an Antidote to Christmas Cheer

The anti-Christmas has arrived at the Lost Studio in Hollywood.

It has no ghosts, just a sinister upstairs neighbor (Harvey Perr) who can hear the young couple below (Mickey Swenson, Cinda Jackson) killing Christmas with quarrels (“Hearth Songs,” written and directed by Joseph Goodrich).

It has no baby Jesus, just a woman in labor (Priscilla Harris) tied to her bed and calling for help to a husband (Michael R. Farkash) who figures it’s not his job, since the baby is, you know, holy, and he didn’t appreciate being shut out (“A Blessed Holiday Event,” written by Farkash, staged by Cinda Jackson).

It has no frock coats, just a naked loser of a husband (Mick Collins) kvetching to his wife (Janet Ditz) about spending too much money they haven’t got on too many presents they shouldn’t give (Swenson’s “Winter Rules,” staged by Collins).

And it has no lush and symmetrical Scotch pine, just a scrawny noble fir for sale by a distracted vendor (Leon Martell) whose particular sexual fixation, readily available on dial-a-porn, is all he wants for Christmas (“And We’ll Stand on Kingdom’s Shore,” written and directed by John Steppling).

Ho-Ho-Humbug. Scrooge himself would concede that this Christmas antidote known as “The Lost Christmas Festival” is highly irregular, not lost so much as it is manque , as in dysfunctional. Even the logo for the festival is an image of a scruffy rat noshing on an old Christmas stocking while another carries a candy cane between its jaws.

It takes a special appetite for pop deconstruction to thrill to such relentlessly black humor, and Thursday’s opening-night audience seemed eager to whip itself into the proper lather. But not all plays were created equal and, significantly, not all were directed equal.

The two that were staged by their authors--Goodrich’s “Hearth Songs” and Steppling’s “Shore”--have the clearest sense of where they’re going. “Songs” basks in charged silences you can cut with a knife, with the additional fillip of a radio Christmas story listened to in darkness by the upstairs neighbor that has the same perverse spin as the rest of the evening.

“Shore” is Steppling’s most ironic piece to date--and the evening’s funniest. While it sticks to his slow, staccato rhythms, there is coherence to the hilarity, including a wondrous deadpan speech out of left field by a character (Tim De Zarn) who, in true Steppling fashion, is blissfully superfluous to the action.

The laughs are driven by the efforts of a couple (Lee Kissman and Priscilla Harris) to buy a Christmas tree and the chatter that exacerbates the poor vendor’s unfulfilled sexual expectations.

But the other two plays fall short of their mark, particularly Swenson’s “Winter Rules,” which is more an enervating circular harangue than a play, and whose formlessness is matched by Collins’ flaccid staging. If it worked better than it does, you might say its lack of shape is the concealed metaphor for the whining husband. As for Farkash’s “Blessed Event,” it’s an idea that works better as a concept than a play.

The evening’s best feature is the Circus Minimus Dancers. These unqualified tap-klutzess from hell open the show, perform interludes between plays and provide their version of a Big Finale.

They also change sets and serve coffee at intermission. Now you know that you’d never get that much bang for the buck from a plain little sugarplum fairy.

“Circus Minimus, the Lost Christmas Festival,” Lost Studio, 130 S. La Brea Ave., Hollywood. Today-Wednesday, 8 p.m. Ends Wednesday. $10; (213) 933-6944. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.