THEATER REVIEW : Locker-Room Talk of a Different Sort : ‘Men’s Singles’ transforms the traditionally macho setting into a place where yuppie males bare their souls.

D.B. Gilles’ “Men’s Singles” isn’t a soap opera, but it creates the audience demands of one. Like any good soap-maker, Gilles sets up his three characters on parallel tracks that occasionally intersect, then pushes them down the tracks with the hope that we want to keep following them.

We would want to, if there were something worth following. It’s interesting that Gilles lets us hear from only one side of a few very complicated relationships--this is a “relationship play” to the nth degree--and that it’s always from the male side. Just as intriguing is how Gilles is always dropping hints that what we’re hearing is only part of the story--the guys’ side, which doubtless distorts the women’s.

All of this is set in a male-bonding environment, the locker room of a Manhattan tennis club, where too much honest vulnerability isn’t encouraged.

Nevertheless, honesty and vulnerability are at the core of what Gilles is concerned about, and events--over the course of 13 weeks and 11 scenes--push these men to open up. It’s just that generally hollow men opening up is little more than a revelation of hollowness.

At the Limelight Theatre, director Floyd Levine tries to make things pop along: You can sense he and his actors kept the tennis mode in mind, so the dialogue is often like verbal volleys. The pace also keeps us from thinking too long about how inconsequential these men are.

It’s not that their actions lack consequences. Advertising executive Rob (Patrick Dean) is too wedded to his career to settle down, so that when he starts actually pursuing a woman, his indecision causes pain and suffering.

Salesman Larry (Michael Andrew Kelly) causes worse--divorce--when he realizes that he isn’t interested in fighting to keep his marriage, and maybe is more interested in what he calls “the single life.”

Psychiatrist Kurt (Doug Spearman), the least developed yet most interesting character, knows that such a life is a sham, but he also knows that marrying a woman while maintaining his gay identity is even more of one.

As written, only Kurt has the heft to carry a play--this despite Spearman’s matter-of-fact delivery (which can be very effective when his Kurt slips into psychiatrist mode).

Kurt’s contradictions, the contrast between his professional cool and his personal chaos, the fact that he is a black man in a very white man’s world, dwarf Rob’s and Larry’s problems. Yet Gilles insists on Rob and Larry being the center of attention.

Just as unfriendly Sunday was a wailing industrial-rock guitarist playing somewhere in the neighborhood. Actor’s hell, but Kelly and Dean held up well. Kelly is especially good at containing Larry’s anger under a chuckle, while Dean simply delivers the difficult assignment of creating a really vacuous guy. Come to think of it, that’s actor’s hell.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Men’s Singles.”

Location: Limelight Theatre, 10634 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 7 p.m. Sundays. Indefinitely.

Price: $12. Proceeds donated to the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

Call: (818) 708-0960.