‘House?’: Witty Look at Quake Blues

Did the Northridge earthquake shatter our spirits as well as our crystal? That’s one of the questions posed by “Where Is My House? Where Is My Home?,” a witty and provocative new performance piece by the Dark Horses Collective at First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles.

Here we have a meditation on how things fall apart, during and after temblors. What’s remarkable is that director Kate Noonan and her fellow players have created a vivid, highly dramatic show about a downbeat, abstract topic: the post-quake blues.

Strung out by catastrophe, the show’s seven Angelenos confront their shared sense of alienation in a series of interlocking monologues. But they also remember what made them fall in love with Southern California in the first place. That love-hate tension reverberates throughout the performance.

“Los Angeles grows on you,” says a gay man (Kirk Wilson) who harks back to a pre-AIDS utopia. “It starts in a dark, quiet booth at Musso & Frank and pretty soon you find yourself defending Angelyne to outsiders.”

Yet not all are blessed with such self-awareness. Take the fluttery suburban housewife (Nancy Taylor) who kids herself into thinking that the riots and fires did not affect her but that the earthquake was a different matter. “Stop it!” she recalls shouting as the ground shook. “I don’t want to die in Reseda! I want to die in Rome!”

Many of the monologues are wrenching and poetic. An earthy senior (Louise Ramsdell) delivers a plain-spoken but deeply moving reminiscence of how she lost her virginity to a sex-starved G.I. one night at Hollywood’s old Studio Club. After exiting the show, the blue taffeta dress she lovingly describes wearing that long-ago night lingers in the memory, an emblem of an extinct Los Angeles.

However, the show leaves one hungry for a little more development. There is an odd sensation of anticlimax, of the whole winding up as somehow less than the sum of the parts.

Still, “Where Is My House?” is the perfect show to shake those aftershock jitters. The supremely gifted actors, several of whom have trained with performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, use but a few props and a time-weathered church stage to summon up a state of mind that all of us are perhaps dimly aware of but rarely discuss.

It’s beyond fear--it’s that nameless dread that maybe stable ground is just a comfortable illusion, in life as in seismology.

* “Where Is My House? Where Is My Home?,” First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, 2936 W. 8th St. Fridays - Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 18. $8-$10. (310) 285-6746. Running time: 1 hour , 10 minutes.

AIDS Heartbreak in ‘Language’

The lasting image of “A Language of Their Own,” at the Celebration Theatre, is that of a man holding the body of his ex-lover who is in the final moments of a two-year battle against AIDS. “I want to fly, fly,” the dying man murmurs, his arms outstretched toward the sky.

This heartbreaking Pieta--actually one character’s deathbed fantasy--forms the climax of Chay Yew’s latest work, a promising but ultimately frustrating look at a love affair undone by AIDS and cultural difference.

The play is in fact two one-acts. In the first, “Learning Chinese,” Oscar (Dennis Dun) and Ming (Chris Tashima), a gay Chinese American couple, decide to break up after Oscar’s recent HIV-positive diagnosis exposes the couple’s deeper schisms over Chinese identity and American assimilation.

In the second part, “Broken English,” they agonize over the breakup, this time with Ming’s new lover Robert (Anthony David) and Oscar’s new lover Daniel (Noel Alumit) along for the ride.

Director Tim Dang has flawless timing and a sure visual sense; he can powerfully evoke a Boston flat or a Hollywood bath house with just two high-backed chairs on a black-box stage. And it’s hard to imagine another quartet of actors better-suited to Yew’s razor-sharp, urbane dialogue. Dun is a special treat as the irrepressible Oscar.

Yet the play itself, which sometimes recalls Robert Chesley’s phone-sex play “Jerker,” touches too lightly on too many expansive subjects--commitment, sex, death, the relative merits of Boston versus Los Angeles--to really satisfy. One wishes that Yew had chosen to dramatize completely just one issue, rather than trying to depict the death of a relationship in what amounts to speeches and clever one-liners.

Come to think of it, though, those one-liners are pretty darn clever.

* “A Language of Their Own,” Celebration Theatre, 7051-B Santa Monica Blvd . , Hollywood. Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends July 10. $15-$20. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours , 10 minutes.

Taking High Road With ‘Three Sisters’

Acting teacher Natalija Nogulich formed the Grace Players late last year, and the troupe has already taken the high road. Its first production, mounted at the Egyptian Arena Theatre, is Anton Chekhov’s classic “The Three Sisters.”

Actually, it’s David Mamet’s adaptation of the play, though how this version has improved on previous translations remains unclear. Nogulich, for her part, studied with Mamet at the playwright’s now-defunct St. Nicholas Theatre in Chicago.

Nogulich herself directs and leads the cast as Masha, the disillusioned sister in a provincial Russian family that’s still reeling from the death of its patriarch a year before. Masha’s stunning second-act declaration of her adulterous love for the weak but dashing battery commander Vershinin (Bernard White) counts as this production’s high point.

Other fine work comes from Eric Siegel as the family’s benighted brother and Earl Carroll as a doctor nursing a dark secret. Among the rest of the cast, ability ranges as much as it would in a typical acting class. Some actors had an unfortunate tendency, at least on opening night, to rush through lines and miss crucial nuance.

Nobody said Chekhov was easy. But this new troupe showed grace under pressure just by trying.

* “The Three Sisters,” Egyptian Arena Theatre, 1625 N. Las Palmas Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends June 26. $10-$12. (213) 464-1222. Running time: 2 hours and 45 minutes.