Theater Review : ‘Tom and Jerry’ a Treat at One-Act Festival

“Act One--Evening B,” the second installment in a festival of original one-act plays sponsored by Showtime, continues to prove entertaining and provoking.

“Tom and Jerry,” the best play so far in the series, is a comedy of the darkest hue that centers around the business-as-usual relationship of two mob hit-men. These matter-of-fact monsters view themselves as regular joes just doing a job--except in their case, instead of exchanging gossip around the office water cooler, they swap yarns over a buzzing chain saw while preparing to dismember their latest victim.

Playwright Rick Cleveland has lifted his comically vicious characters straight out of an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon and placed them in a hyper-real, psychically numbing universe in which the medium is the massacre.

In their respective roles as Tom and Jerry, Sam McMurray and Bruce MacVittie use sure-fire timing with lethal effect. McMurray’s mellow avuncularity contrasts perfectly with MacVittie’s garrote-taut nerviness. Dan Castellaneta (known popularly as the voice of Homer Simpson) portrays all the other characters with dead-eyed panache. Director Saul Rubinek’s dispassionate, throwaway style subtly underlines the horror.

While not quite as gush-worthy, the evening’s opener, “Lynette at 3 A.M.,” by Jane Anderson, is an amusing hors d’oeuvre about a young woman who, while in bed with her boyfriend, is visited by an amorous spirit en route to the hereafter.

Anne O’Sullivan, Pat Skipper and Yul Vazquez milk the moments in this paranormal love triangle, and Anderson, a past master at juxtaposing the mundane with the extraordinary, has given her own work an optimum staging.

“A Death in Bethany,” by Garry Williams, is a visceral drama about a man arduously freeing himself from the emotional legacy of his neglectful father. David Packer plays a man in meltdown, whose relationship with his long-suffering wife, played by Kellie Overbey, has reached critical mass.

The second act opens with “Iron Tommy,” James Ryan’s comedy about a male-bonding group, in which the bondees beat drums, roar like lions, weep wrenchingly and search for their inner men-children. Satisfyingly silly and often hilarious, Ryan’s play flags with the arrival of (what else?) an eye-poppingly beautiful young woman who sets the boys a-slobberin’.

The evening’s closer, Wil Calhoun’s “Call It Clover,” is a steamy character piece set in New Orleans that examines the nature of dreams and diminishing expectations.

Risa Bramon Garcia directs her actors well, although the sorghum-thick Louisiana dialect occasionally clogs up performances. Arliss Howard is endearing as the puppy-cute Eddie, an antithetical redneck whose geniality and humanity form the crux of the play. Unfortunately, when Calhoun metaphorically whips the puppy in a contrived ending, the audience feels emotionally manipulated.

* “Act One: A Festival of New One-Act Plays--Evening B,” Met Theatre, 1089 Oxford Ave., Hollywood. Tonight, Thursday, Monday, June 10, 15, 16, 17, 20, and 27, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday and June 26, 3 p.m; June 10, 10:30 p.m.; June 25, 5 and 9 p.m. (213) 957-1152. $17 (three-evening pass, $40.) Running time: 3 hours.