Wallace Shawn Skewers Yuppie Alienation

Welcome to Wally’s witty Weltschmerz. It’s not your usual take on the cocktail party moody blues. But then Wallace Shawn is hardly a usual playwright, as his sly “Our Late Night” at the Powerhouse proves.

Shawn’s peephole view of a late-night loft gathering is both hyper-realistic and abstract. The scene may look like just another klatch of bored yuppies and artists, but it’s actually a subtly calibrated study in animal behavior. Using dialogue that captures what’s between the lines of familiar social banter, Shawn reveals layers of alienation, fear and hypocrisy, not to mention humor.

The seven personas who splay themselves across the couch, pose in the corners and verbally joust with one another in this meeting of the mindless include a host couple, a wallflower, a klutzy pseudo-lothario, a fragile woman and others. Shawn has these archetypal but familiar men and women talk about matters mainly sexual, in language that is oblique yet poetic, lyrical yet sardonic.

Penned 10 years before his staunch 1985 “Aunt Dan and Lemmon,” this play also boasts Shawn’s characteristically rich language. It’s both heady and funny, perfectly capturing the alienation that runs rampant in the loft scene.

Less than perfect is the cast. While director Karen Ludwig has a clear vision of the overall arch of the play, not all of her actors are equally at ease speaking this formidable playwright’s symbolic and sometimes baroque tongue. But the Shawn shines in nonetheless.

* “Our Late Night,” Powerhouse Theater, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 26. $12. (310) 392-6529. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

‘Gone Fishin’ ’ Hooks Some Laughs

Paul Navarra’s quirky “Gone Fishin’ ” at the Cast is sloppy, sophomoric and too smug for its own good. But at least it shows the traces of a promisingly adventurous writer’s imagination.

The comedy starts with a guy and a gal meeting on a fishing pier. Things are soon not what they seem, though, as weird characters, ranging from contemporary biblical figures to a band of singing Gypsy lawyers, troop into the picture. They pull the couple from pillar to post in an abstract romp about the nature of human attachments.

The hero and heroine are the anchors throughout this parable, but they’re the least interesting characters onstage. That’s partly Navarra’s fault, but it’s also because the leads aren’t up to the task. They play this absurdist fare like a sitcom, and a cheesy one at that.

Both Navarra’s play and especially this production, which the writer directed, are all over the place. Still, it’s encouraging to see a playwright venture away from the uninspired realism of much local stage fare. Now he needs to go fishin’ for a rewrite or several, reel in a more seasoned cast and then have someone other than himself direct.

* “Gone Fishin,’ ” Cast Theatre, 804 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 2. $12. (213) 462-0265. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.

Three Sisters, but Not Chekhov’s

A cliched tear-jerker about siblings packing up their Iowa family home, Rick Garman’s “17 Days” at the Colony is so slushy that it nearly obscures the respectable if uninspired work of several of its cast members.

Tamely directed by actor (and “Star Trek” Klingon) Robert O’Reilly, the story focuses on three sisters--a flaky eccentric (the beguiling and reliable Bonita Friedericy), a boring hausfrau (the too even-keeled Laura Wernette) and a cold conservative congresswoman (the also too-even Lisa Gates)--who gather at their deceased parents’ Cedar Rapids house. They have 17 days to divvy up the household flotsam and jetsam and clear the place out before the new owners arrive.

The two nasty sisters have not invited their brother--a gay rock star with AIDS (miscast but competent Nick DeGruccio)--but he shows up anyway, thanks to his flaky sister, provoking exactly the kind of soap opera clashes you’d expect.

First of all, you see these setups coming a mile down the road. But the whole protracted melodrama is also oddly uncharged. It’s not until the end of a largely expository Act I, for instance, that you get a scene whose conflict has some verity. And even then, the impact is minimal. Act II is not only more unctuous, but also more attenuated.

* “17 Days,” Colony Studio Theatre, 1944 Riverside Drive, Silver Lake. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Oct. 3. $18-$20. (213) 665-3011. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

‘Flying Solo’ Launches Series

Writer-director Leslie Ann Rivers’ “Flying Solo” has launched PRTE’s new late-night series with a thundering thud. It’s not only that her academic string of women’s monologues is sappy drivel stuck in a late ‘70s aesthetic. It’s also that the final entry, which Rivers herself performs, is so pathetic that it casts a Bigfoot-size shadow over even the flashes of fine acting elsewhere in the production.

Energetic Mary Seward-McKeon delivers the evening’s best performance, as a late 17th-Century “healer” musing in her cell as she’s about to be fried to a crisp. Jennifer Taub also has moments as a “housewife” about to sky-dive. But Suzanne Ford and Kathryn Macke, as a German wife-mom at 1893 Ellis Island and a contemporary rural Missouri wife-mom, respectively, don’t take any risks with cloying roles. And Rivers hasn’t given them any help.

It’s the much longer monologue that Rivers saves for herself, however, that’s “Flying Solo’s” embarrassing debacle. Cast as a ditzy painter in a monologue that smells of thinly veiled autobiography, Rivers, who’s even less of an actress than she is a writer-director, begins by showing us her in-home pregnancy test. It’s downhill from there, as she whines about her desires, her dog and a number of other things you’d rather not hear about onstage. Save it for the support group, hon.

* “Flying Solo,” Pacific Resident Theatre Ensemble, 8780 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles. Fridays-Saturdays, 11 p.m. Ends Sept. 11. $7.50. (213) 660-TKTS. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

‘Color Me Black’ Needs Trimming

Randy Saint Martin’s pat multi-character monologue “Color Me Black” at Odyssey Theatre is nothing to fax home about. But it could be a tight little showcase for his thespian skills if he hacked about 45 minutes off the thing.

Saint Martin, who has added a couple of characters to the show since the last time he trotted it out on local stages, gets off to a bad start playing a little boy wondering which new daddy he’s going to get. He moves from there to such familiar types as a seedy ex-pimp, a gangbanger and a Beemer-driving buppie. Saint Martin assays these roles competently. But he’s no great shakes as a writer.

Losing several of the seven vignettes would take care of the redundancies. It would also put the focus on what’s strong, such as Saint Martin’s final entry, in which he plays a preacher who gives a compelling rendition of a James Weldon Johnson poem. In fact, this is the only segment of “Color Me Black” that Saint Martin didn’t write himself. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

* “Color Me Black,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A., Mondays-Tuesdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m. (except Sept. 5, 7 p.m.; dark Sept. 12). Ends Sept. 14. $12. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.