THEATER REVIEW : Low Farce Meets High Art in a Frenetic ‘Improvisation’

After a long, dark silence, the historic red-brick Union Temple Hall in Old Town has been transformed into Pasadena’s newest live theatrical venue.

The Dramatic New Arts Theater Company signaled its opening and mission with an obscure early play by a master of absurdist theater, Eugene Ionesco.

For its inaugural production in the high-ceilinged, roomy union hall converted to a 99-seat theater, the company is staging the French playwright’s one-hour, one-act intellectual farce “Improvisation” (1956), a kind of “Theater of Blood,” for those who remember and relish the wonderful Vincent Price movie about a stage actor who takes murderous revenge on a gaggle of theater critics.

In this instance, the late playwright (who died last March and is the author of the much more familiar “Rhinoceros” and “Exit the King”) casts himself as an artiste confronted in his study by a trio of theater scholar/critics who demand to be told the subject of the play he’s finishing that very moment. Under a bombardment of nosy questions, a flustered Ionesco (Seth Panitch) can really only tell them his new play’s title: “The Shepherd’s Chameleon.”

We quickly discern that “Improvisation” is about many things--writing, language, criticism, the nature of theater. But though its verbosity can be exhausting, director Gregory Gliedman deftly mixes physicality of performance with witty wordplay so that the comic force of the work vies equally with its ideas.

The result, though a bit frenetic, happily entwines low farce with the aspirations of high art.

The creative process, as both the real Ionesco and the stage-bound character Ionesco tell us, defies description. Creativity must speak for itself. Critics like those on our stage--dressed, not coincidentally, in overwrought theatrical costumes (Raymond Donahey’s gigantic codpiece is a riot)--intone smirking inanities like “stylized realism” and “creative mechanisms” in every other breath while analyzing the life out of art.

Debating Ionesco, the female critic of the group (Alexandra Goodman, costumed like a Jazz Age flapper) shouts that “poetry is an enemy of our science.”

Preens another critic (the delightfully arch and simpering John Tracy): “The public shouldn’t enjoy themselves at the theater--boredom is entertainment.”

Finally, in the play’s didactic, blistering coda, Panitch’s flustered Ionesco, propped up by his sensible broom-wielding housekeeper (Tanya Fogerty as the play’s singularly sane figure), reels off a scathing tirade against his officious intruders. “The playwright,” Ionesco declares, “discovers elementary truths” while the critics who later will tear his play to pieces deal in intellectual sophistry.

As Ionesco, Panitch is a touch too American in his fresh, youthful good looks to suggest the avant-garde intellectual, but he performs with affable panache.

Obviously, this is not everybody’s cup of theater. But it’s a serious beginning.

* “Improvisation,” Dramatic New Arts Theater Company, 42 E. Walnut Ave., Pasadena, Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday matinee, 2 p.m. Ends June 19. $10 to $12. (818) 568-9850. Running time: one hour.