A ‘Vigil’ With Disenchanted Mourners

Artie is dead. He was a poet who was working on his first novel. He committed suicide in his bathtub, and tonight is his wake. Everybody misses him, especially his live-in girlfriend of six months, Myra (Cynthia Savage), and his lifelong best friend Peter (J. D. Lewis).

Never having met, Myra and Peter find their mutual disenchantment over the coldness of the wake a bond, and adjourn to Peter’s flat to hold their own “Lonely Vigil for a Stranger.” Mark Borkowski’s drama, at the Burbage Theatre, records the fireworks and the poetry of their long evening together.

If the play is short on plot, it is very long on intricate character development, with particular attention to the shape and texture of memory, the thin ice of two people reaching out for some little glimmer of understanding and the frustration of ships that pass in the night.

“Vigil” is not a play about a relationship as it is usually considered. This relationship goes nowhere, except into the hearts and souls of two people who loved Artie, and understood him even less than they understand themselves.

Peter is also a poet, but has become a commercial fish salesman. Myra is a sculptor, who started out obsessed by genitals, but now is into hands. They are losers with a winning warmth, winners with a chilly outlook on life, and Borkowski, who also directs with compelling insight into the small world he has created, knows Peter and Myra inside out. He records the Manhattanese flawlessly, and gives deep tone to these icons of modern disenchantment.

Savage gives a raw-boned strength to Myra’s surface, without missing a beat of her own simmering terrors. But it is Lewis’ Peter who almost steals the evening, with the roller coaster delivery of his shifting moods and mercurial speech.

The actors take the reality of the writing and give it just enough theatricality to make their brief moment stick in the memory as persistently as that open coffin Artie didn’t want sticks in theirs.

“Lonely Vigil for a Stranger,” Burbage Theatre, 2330 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles. Fridays-Saturdays, 9 p.m. (dark tonight). Ends Jan. 23. $15; (310) 478-0897. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

Two One-Acts in ‘The Men’s Room’

“An Evening in the Men’s Room,” at American Renegade Theatre, begins with promise: flashing red lights issuing from the bowls in each of the three stalls. Something odd is going on.

In this case, and for the most part, the promise is kept. Two one-acts are joined by the same porcelained locale and by a mutual character, The Fiance.

Allan Katz’s “Sixty-Nine Sexual Fantasies by Dr. Max Anderson With Joan Clapper,” concerns a couple, he a sex therapist, she (in male drag) a ghostwriter who is living through his fantasies with him. It’s all above board. They’re writing a book, and only reluctantly do they finally realize that without the fantasies, they actually might be interested in each other.

Like “Fantasies,” Joseph Coyne’s “The Bomb Inside” is really glorified sitcom, concerning an ex-husband who is in the loo with bombs strapped around his waist, trying to prevent his ex-wife from marrying The Fiance.

What raises both productions a bit above sitcom is Katz’s usually rapid-fire direction, and some very funny performances.

Notable among them are understudy Mark Brush, whose naivete and dumbfounded facade as The Fiance couldn’t be more on the nose; Duff Dugan’s volatile split-personality bomber; Richard Cooper’s frantic therapist; Tracy Katz’s horsy, desperate second bride, and Paul Roache as her bumbling, unwilling groom.

“An Evening in the Men’s Room,” American Renegade Theatre, 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. (dark tonight). Ends Jan. 31. $10; (818) 763-4430. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

‘Twisted Romance’ Five Times Over

“Twisted Romance” is an evening of playlets or, more realistically, scenes, that once again prove the axiom that (like short stories and novels) short dramatic episodes are much harder to write than full-length plays.

Of the five, Lisa Morton’s “Sane Reaction,” directed by the playwright, is the strongest. It also has the strongest performances--by Marybeth Delucia and John Benjamin Martin as a couple who met at a party neither was invited to, bound for a deliciously macabre date neither expected.

Martin also wrote “Sciamachy” (directed by Sidney Wickersham) about a greedy man who is finally confronted by his shadow, who knows all and is not about to let him forget it. It is a gimmicky playlet that never really pays off.

Martin’s other piece, “The Pedestal” (which he also directs), has Julia Rhoda as a young woman in a raincoat who dances formlessly in the park, seen only by a man with definite ideas about the beauty of her actions, nicely played here by John Gallucci. It is almost touching in its comment about what we expect in a romantic partner, but it doesn’t go far enough to make its comment forcefully.

Marion Gallo’s one-woman “Kinky,” directed by Gallucci, is at times amusing, but seems to have no other purpose than to allow Gallo to camp, particularly in the role of a slightly overdone French neighbor. When it begins to say something, it will be funnier.

The low point in the program is reached by Lisa Morton’s “What a Riot,” which she directs like a visit with the Clampetts. Her Yucca Valley hillbillies can’t make the L.A. riots even vaguely amusing, and Katie Schwartz and Lonnie Schuyler’s cartoon performances make the Clampetts look like European nobility.

“Twisted Romance,” Burbage Theatre, 2330 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles. Thursdays, 8:30 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. (dark tonight). Ends Jan. 23. $15; (310) 478-0897. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

A Barrage Against ‘The Brutal Biz’

To join the canon of plays about the madcap, ludicrously powerful, sometimes toweringly dumb denizens of Hollywood, Paul T. Murray has written and directs “The Big Bad Brutal Biz.” It will not replace anything in the standard repertoire of filmdom’s exposes.

There is no need to detail the same old plot about nefarious dealings, job-takeovers, back-stabbing, etc. Much of Murray’s material has been seen before. The humor might be more valid if he hadn’t directed his actors to play at such an outrageously broad level, with mugging, grimacing, posturing and eye-rolling passing for comedy.

He also gets his periods mixed up, gleaned from every era since Ince. Purportedly taking place today (one studio head is O’Fitz--read Ovitz), Murray has a ‘30s drunken hustler who knows where the skeletons are, a flamboyant European ‘20s director, and a stage mother who knows how to get into studio heads’ offices (what’s her secret?) with her untalented, baton-twirling brat.

The biz isn’t as big, bad or brutal as is this misfired barrage.

“The Big Bad Brutal Biz,” American Renegade Theatre, 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. (dark tonight). Ends Jan. 31. $12; (818) 763-4430. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.