THEATER REVIEW : Secrets Not Worth Knowing : ‘Poker Face,’ at the Little Victory Theatre, is so full of self-consumed types that it doesn’t really need an audience.

The Dirty Secret Play used to be constructed in long, developing dramatic arcs, usually involving families. By the end, the clan was laid bare, beaten and purged. Think of the father, for instance, in Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” with his secret about his murderous engineering scams. That was a Dirty Big Secret Play.

In the ‘90s, it has evolved into the Dirty Little Secret Play--so little, in fact, that the secrets aren’t even worth the wait. In Cornelia Koehl’s “Poker Face,” at the Little Victory Theatre, there’s no family (which isn’t a problem), and whatever high stakes there may be are strictly monetary, not emotional (which is). The purging here is solipsistic, pseudo-therapeutic, all of it for the character, none of it for us.

Certainly Koehl didn’t conceive of such a thing, but “Poker Face” is so full of self-consumed types that it doesn’t really need an audience. The play has one anyway, so it’s fair to ask where we fit in.

Voyeurs, perhaps. We’re looking in on a poker game that Martin (Michael Bauer) is throwing for the guys in his apartment building. Martin wants men only, since his wife just left him for another woman.

So who should walk in but two women--sassy Danny (Koehl) and sexy Bobby (Diana Gunther). (Martin’s mistake, you see, was to put invitational flyers under the door of every apartment with a man’s name.) The guys show up too: Shy momma’s boy Tim (Peter Husmann); Fred, a stand-up comic with killer dimples (Frank Costa); James, seemingly a professional ladies’ man (Jay Richardson); and Andrew, whose appearance announces The Gay Character (Tom Enyart).

Koehl’s conceit here is that since the game of power is won by those with the least-revealing poker face, the most challenging brand of poker would be the one that rewards the player who tells the juiciest secret.

For a fair stretch of “Poker Face,” there are plenty of reasons to play along with Koehl’s game. Even though it’s painfully obvious that each of these people are poseurs of one sort or another (except, notably, Koehl’s Danny, the least interesting of the bunch), director Steven Smith help creates a scruffy, party atmosphere with occasional bursts of group spontaneity that seem like an Altman movie on stage. How much of this is Smith’s doing, and how much Gerald Castillo’s (who departed as director before the opening) is impossible to know.

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Act II’s opening, with a montage of frozen stage pictures of the party winding down (or up) into the wee hours, suggests that “Poker Face” may be aiming for a heightened theatricalism, a symbolic America giving up its secrets.

No such luck. Andrew ends up being the “bank” of the house and some kind of master poker shark as well; he’s also the Gay Outsider Shrink in this ultra-hetero world. He’s pushed everyone so far into debt that they have to tell their secrets not so much to win, but to get out of the red. One by one, each goes at it, predictably, like ducks on a pond. Andrew nods, listens and counsels (“Tell us about it, James . . .”) with a creepy self-satisfaction--as Enyart plays him--that Koehl never takes any jabs at.

Everyone else is jabbed, though, gently or harshly, especially the ever-reviled white male heterosexual. A “coming out” ends up being a mechanical, crude device to belatedly add substance to stereotypes--and the secrets are rarely all that substantial.

The actors themselves, alas, seldom manage the transition from facade to human, and play on the surface to the end. Koehl, Bauer and David Andrew Salper (as a religious huckster who keeps senselessly intruding on the party and the play’s flow) are strictly on the sidelines. Gunther only mildly tweaks Bobby’s blond bombshell persona. Husmann makes Tim pathetic and nothing more, while Costa manages to turn Fred’s shtick into effective self-deprecation. Richardson’s climactic moments as James lack any of the kind of emotional nakedness “Poker Face” is clearly attempting. In that sense, it’s a performance and play in tandem with each other.

Where and When What: “Poker Face.” Location: Little Victory Theatre, 3324 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Nov. 21. Price: $15. Call: (818) 841-4404.