THEATER REVIEW : The Road at Padua Festival Can Be Long and Winding

Here’s a late-breaking update on part two of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival at Woodbury University: Whoever makes it through the nearly five hours of B Series will find at the end a delightful piece of ensemble acting in Susan Champagne’s fizzy comedy “Away From Me.” Up until that point, however, the evening feels longer than “Nicholas Nickleby.”

In the noble Padua tradition, the audience tromps from one outdoor site to another, learning how gracefully a cement courtyard or a ramp for the disabled can serve as an impromptu stage. The playwrights all direct their own work.

The B Series starts on a hyperbolic pitch with festival founder Murray Mednick’s “Switchback,” which takes place in an apocalyptic “Mad Max” landscape. A woman with a baby carriage is dodging gunfire. So is a young woman dressed as a young man. Enter a soldier (his entrance, achieved with the help of remote-control toys, is one of the high points of the entire festival) and you have the family of man represented on stage: Mother, Man, Young Woman/Young Man, Baby. “Switchback” is happiest when things are symbolic.

Mednick’s language has a pseudo-Beckett rhythm, particularly when the women can’t decide what to do. Sometimes the cross-dresser, convulsing from fear and a drug dependency, sounds like a Jet in “West Side Story”: “Kids are stickin’ it to each other all over--Sarajevo and Rio and Brooklyn.” True, but do we need this screamed at us by a twitching methadone addict? Bring back the remote-control toys.

On to the next site--Susan Mosakowski sets “Locofoco” on a little bit of lawn where four sisters lounge in four large boxes. One of them, Novena Jet (Shawna Casey), hosts a late-night radio show for Jesus. Another (Tina Preston) used to host the news, and she’s still getting satellite feeds from the transmitter embedded in her ear. “No, I don’t want the top stories!” she screams to no one. A third sister, Kore (Molly Cleator), is regularly abducted by aliens, and the fourth (Pamela Gordon), sells fire insurance in order to go to Casablanca and get that sex change operation.

Piled one on the other, the sisters’ insistent eccentricities are cloying. Cleator alone breaks through, with her passionate demand of one of her sisters, “Parts of me are missing! Find them!”

Shem Bitterman’s “Justice” is the only play that uses an institutional space (the courtyard of a college building) to explore the cold, urban places where certain crimes are committed and where condemned men are sent.

“Justice” follows a black prisoner named Anderson (Jerome Butler) on a Job-like odyssey through the prison system, where a white guard taunts him by gently explaining that God is a black man and Satan white before administering a brutal beating. Questions of innocence and guilt swirl about, and the moral issues remain purposefully cloudy. If Anderson is not a murderer, as he claims, it is only because of a lame technicality (he scared a guy into shooting himself). After the guard’s beating, he turns his wheelchair in circles demanding, “What the (expletive) is justice?”

Finally a sadist named Jim (the excellent Peter Berg) delivers a spiritual afterward that smells of overwriting.

That’s why it’s a relief to get to the clipped phrases and shapely scenes of Champagne’s “Away From Me.” A nerdy shrink (Steven Keyes) is losing control of a group therapy session as the play starts. “How does everyone feel about how she feels?” is a favorite question. Champagne is a wonderful director with a light touch, and this is the only play of the evening that has one. The cast is excellent.

The Padua Hills Playwrights Festival is a hodgepodge of experiences and places as unlikely as it is uneven. For the adventurous theatergoer making the trek, the first series, known as the A Series, should be the first stop.

* “Padua Hills Playwrights Festival,” Woodbury University, 7500 Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank, Thursdays-Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends Aug. 14. $20 or $35 for both nights. A Series, Thursdays and Fridays; B Series, Saturdays and Sundays. (213) 466-1767. Running time: B Series: 4 hours, 50 minutes.