THEATER REVIEW : 2 Dramas Draw on Grit and Wit : ‘Hot Snow’ and ‘Seven Is Enough,’ with all-black casts, put a new spin on a familiar genre.

Dramas about women in prison, thanks to cheap movies and campy stage satires, conjure up white slavery, lesbian guards, sleaze and exploitation.

So it’s unexpectedly refreshing to encounter a pair of jailhouse diamonds-in-the-rough, “Hot Snow” and “Seven Is Enough,” that put a new spin on women behind bars, in one-acts at the Company of CharActors above Jerry’s Deli in Studio City.

Both plays are produced, directed and cast with all-black female talent. Sloan Robinson’s two-character “Seven Is Enough” is boisterous, gritty and witty and dramatic; James P. Mirrione’s four-character “Hot Snow” is rhythmic, elegiac and choreographically explosive. The evening’s discovery and most inventive work, “Hot Snow,” is based on the little-known life of American jazz trumpeter / singer / dancer / actress Valaida Snow (1900-1956).

Like contemporary Josephine Baker, Valaida Snow, too, was hot in Europe in the ‘20s and ‘30s. But during a gig in Copenhagen in 1941, she wound up in a Nazi concentration camp--a black American woman in a Nazi death camp protesting that she was only cutting platters in Denmark.

The play’s action is framed by Snow’s two years in the camp, deftly suggested by a cart full of raggedy clothes, Stars of David flapping in the air, and Valaida’s forlorn suitcase. But instead of dramatizing a Nazi nightmare, director Imani has conceptually opened up her subject’s life by deploying four actresses to represent Valaida’s multiple artistic talents in a memory-laden framework.

Valaida the dancer is portrayed by stunning choreographer Kiki Shepard who materializes like a towering, serpentine figure from Harlem’s Apollo Theatre (and, in fact, made her debut as the choreographer on TV’s “It’s Showtime at the Apollo”). Valaida the jazz trumpeter is parlayed by La Jeune Bell peeling off hot and cool brassy licks; Valaida the actress by Ella Joyce’s protestations, fear and pain; and Valaida the singer by sensual dancer-vocalist Mariann Aalda (who, too often drenched in shadow, deserves much better lighting).

Most elements--among them, rare, still-photographic projections of the real Valaida Snow, Melody A. Beal’s rags-to-glitter costumes and Greg Wright’s sound design--create a surprisingly seamless, evocative production that deserves an expanded future and is sure to get it.

Director Imani (a 1992 graduate of Warner Bros. Writers Workshop) researched her subject at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Los Angeles’ Holocaust Museum. She has brought to life a fascinating character who has remained inexplicably obscure to most jazz devotees not to mention lovers of a good dramatic yarn.

*

Imani first staged the material in New York in 1986 under the auspices of the Women’s Project. This is the West Coast premiere.

“Seven Is Enough,” never before staged, features a hilariously vulgar Gigi Olden as a tough hooker explaining life inside the cage to a near-goldilocked lamb of a cellmate (splendidly acted by producer Valerie McWilliams), who grows up quickly and unleashes a few surprises of her own.

An intimidating off-stage guard’s voice (Marlynne Cooley) contributes to the atmosphere.

Directed with whip-cracking gusto by Juney Smith, this one-act is more predictable and conventional than “Hot Snow”--complete with cliche monologues we’ve heard before--but the director and the playwright deliver some mean, raucous blows.

The show’s gaping flaw is its hugely unreal, squeaky clean cell, about five times the size of a cell at, say, Sybil Brand. Instead of telescoping and scaling down the stage, the production uses the whole wide proscenium, thus dissipating the tension. Interestingly, no production designer is credited.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Hot Snow” and “Seven Is Enough.”

Location: Company of CharActors, 12655 Ventura Blvd., Studio City.

Hours: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Closes Dec. 18.

Price: $12.

Call: (213) 467-7087.