Theater Reviews : Three Actors Are a Charm in ‘Indio’ : Though the Revolving Door production has problems, a trio of distinctly drawn characters keeps the play from lapsing into cliche.

It’s easy to connect the cult luminaries playwright-director Joel Beers acknowledges in the program for his new play, “Indio,” to the play itself. Sam Shepard, Raymond Berry, David Lynch, Lenny Bruce, Sal Paradise and Blind Boy Grunt make up the list of American fringe cool guys.

The big man missing from the list, but whose presence is felt all over Beers’ play about pathologies run amok in the California desert, is Quentin (“Reservoir Dogs”) Tarantino.

It was probably Beers’ oversight, because he’s absorbed Tarantino’s blend of sudden mayhem and epic-length verbiage through his pores. Of course, Tarantino has gleefully stolen from, among many others, Shepard, Lynch and maybe Bruce, too.

What “Indio” adds to the tradition is the Baby Buster Factor: Everyone in “Indio” is aware, more or less, that they’re part of a twentysomething generation in search of itself. And they’re not doing a very good job of finding out where to go.

In the Revolving Door production currently at the Tribune Theatre (formerly the Teatro Cometa Playhouse), Beers’ spare, physicalized staging is sometimes as unclear as the generation he’s depicting.

Myopic subjects can produce myopic results, but what releases “Indio” from the grip of its own despair is a trio of distinctly drawn characters.

In one corner, we have George (Nick Boicourt Jr.), your basic, red-blooded loser, who sinks to ransoming kidnap victims to make money. In another corner is George’s increasingly vicious girlfriend, Melissa (Jennifer Bishton), who wants to use the ransom money to buy a Wisconsin farm. In Corner 3 is the kidnapee, David (Adam Clark, who is being replaced this week by Steven Lamprinos), who isn’t nearly as well-heeled as George assumes.

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What prevents “Indio” from lapsing into the usual formulas of the crime genre is the ever-shifting triangle. Sure, George is an impulsive jerk who doesn’t have a clue how to pull off a proper kidnaping, but he also has a hapless side that finds in David the kind of buddy-bonding he can’t possibly have with Melissa.

True to her genre roots, Melissa is the most capable of evil, a real ‘90s grrrl. But she’s explicable through her autobiographical monologue (each of them has one), describing a trailer-park upbringing that bred her to be an animal. David earns his living at a Fullerton gas station, but what he really does is write, and all through “Indio,” he’s aware of being in a plot that he wants to resolve.

This proves to be a neater idea than a reality on stage, because after the cleverer David gets the upper hand, Beers’ own plot goes haywire with a ludicrous denouement.

We might swallow it if he had a cast able to maneuver through the script’s long, thick speeches and exchanges; this one loses enough energy along the way that when the ending comes, they’re out of dramatic gas. “Indio” wants to build to a frenzied, cathartic finish, but these actors can’t quite play the music.

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They do have their moments, though. Bishton (also in a brief, surprise appearance as a civilized woman in a bar) shows off her range, though she hasn’t found a way to make Melissa’s badness interesting.

This is true for Boicourt, but he’s best at suggesting George’s crazy inner workings when he’s being funny. Clark feels more comfortable with his good-boy-thrown-into-crisis role, and he never shows us David’s hand before he plays.

Come to think of it--Lynch, Shepard, Berry, Tarantino--they’re pretty messy in the plot and dialogue departments themselves. You take the good with the bad, but this is the kind of rough-edged, no-budget younger theater in which Orange County has been embarrassingly lacking.

* “Indio,” Tribune Theatre, 116 1/2 W. Wilshire Ave., Fullerton. Friday-Sunday, 8:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. (714) 525-3403. $5. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes. Nick Boicourt Jr.: George

Jennifer Bishton; Melissa/Woman in Bar

Adam Clark/Steven Lamprinos: David

Michael Mollo; Barfly

Bradley A. Whitfield: Bartender

Jeff Vanderburgh: Customer

A Revolving Door production of Joel Beers’ play. Directed by Beers. Set: Bradley A. Whitfield. Lights: Noah Shultz. Music and sound: Chris Dalu.