Lost in a City of Angels

They come and they go, hauling hope when they arrive and despair when they leave, like new Americans on Ellis Island a long time ago.

L.A. is their mecca, an oasis in the desert, a mirage in the distance, the music of temptation to a sailor long at sea. We tantalize, we tease, we beckon, we lure. Come to the cabaret, old chum . . . .

Hollywood. Show biz. Fame. Wealth. The dreamers come to act, write, direct and produce, to be near where movies are made, where series are created, where sets rise and fall, where cameras roll.

Or they come to seek another life on the bones of an old one, new Okies on the move toward a city of gold at the rim of the Pacific.

That’s us. That’s L.A. And though many are fleeing a post-riot town humbled by guilt and violence, many are also still arriving. And many stay.

That’s an element of the theme in a new Equity waiver play, “Lost Angels,” that opens next month at a Hollywood theater called the Complex. The lost angels are the people who stay.

It was brought to my attention by publicist Ellen Friedberg who thought I might like to preview writer-actor Robert LaMoia’s satirical glimpse of L.A. from the standpoint of one who’s been here only 2 1/2 years.

I sat through a rehearsal, which gave me an idea of how others perceive at least some of us--the some being a new arrival, a homeless man, an actor and a producer.

They’re like a David Hockney painting of a house in the Hollywood Hills, with a dimension that lies in the distance of our own imagination.

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“Lost Angels” pities us a little, the way you might pity a child in a house of mirrors, confused by images and bedazzled by contradictions.

It’s a one-man play. LaMoia’s first character is an actor who, like LaMoia, has been in L.A. for a short time and is greeting a fellow paisano named Joey, who has just arrived from New York.

He tells Joey that since coming here, he’s got a new body, a ponytail, a linen jacket and some Armani underwear. Just what you need to get by in L.A. Also a condo with a Jacuzzi and a girlfriend with big breasts.

“But you,” he says to Joey, “you pull up stakes and move to L.A. and all you bring is a toothpick, a leather jacket and a gym bag full of dirty laundry. Just what L.A. needs, another beat-up suitcase.” He talks about the city’s lousy cops, no place to eat after 11, dumb theatrical agents, crowded freeways and the importance of image, especially when it comes to the kind of car you drive. His own wheels consist of a Jaguar body with a Chevy engine.

But the most important rule of all, the actor tells Joey, is to suck up. “If there’s a boot to lick. . . . I’m there. A handshake and a verbal agreement mean nothing. The next thing you know someone’s saying ‘Luv ya . . . mean it . . . bye.’ ”

And forget places like Spago for Italian food. “You gonna eat pumpkin ravioli stuffed with crab meat in a hazelnut cream sauce? Your mother would die.”

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LaMoia’s most compelling character is a laid-off aircraft engineer who ends up homeless and begging. “You probably don’t recognize me,” he tells the passing crowds, “but I’m you.” It’s parody with an attitude.

“I know what it’s like to go golfing on a Sunday morning,” he says, “to take the kids for a weekend, to go for a train ride in Griffith Park, to buy a mid-size van with bench seats and a cooler. . . .”

He had all that once, he says. And then came the big layoff at Lockheed. He sighs. “They’re not making bombers anymore.”

LaMoia, 34, was moved to write “Lost Angels” as a result of the culture shock he suffered when he came to L.A. from Providence, R.I. “Like driving 111 miles for cigarettes and milk,” he says, “or getting a ticket for jaywalking at midnight. . . .”

Primarily an actor, LaMoia arrived with a dream of his own. Ask him about it and he’ll reply with a hard grin: “A 10-picture deal with Warner wouldn’t be too bad to begin with.”

True to the show biz admonition not to quit your day job, he builds and remodels kitchens when he isn’t acting. “I’m one of the lost angels,” he says. “I’ll stay in L.A. What would I do back home, marry, open a pizza parlor and get fat?”

In a way, LaMoia’s play is about what almost everyone thinks of L.A. as a place of wild excesses, of deals and desperation, a landscape of dead dreams and broken promises.

Still the dreamers come and still they’ll keep coming, and all we can hope is that at least some of their dreams will come true.