THEATER REVIEW : Misplaced Madness Takes Over Stage : Play about Van Gogh becomes a screaming match and fails to convey artist’s depth.

It doesn’t take long for a screaming match to erupt in James Kennedy’s biographical drama on Van Gogh, “Mad Vincent,” at the Odessa Theatre. It takes, however, a very long time for the screaming match to end: the final, screaming scene.

“Loud Vincent” is more like it, an astoundingly inept and frenetic telling of the last crucial eight years in the sad life of the painter. Although Brant Cotton, at certain angles and in certain light, closely resembles Van Gogh, there is nothing else in writer-director Kennedy’s play and staging that closely suggests verisimilitude. Even the charitable assumption that the play--first produced in 1976--is meant to recreate a crazed mind through crazed, high-pitched dialogues finally collapses.

That Van Gogh has never been properly dramatized in countless films and plays may say something about him: His artistic struggle is notorious, but it was mostly a profoundly inner one. Neither imagined spoken exchanges nor imagery designed to imitate his canvases have ever come close to the drama of the paintings themselves. Van Gogh’s gradual mental and physical collapse occurred while his painting mastery exploded--a combination tempting to the dramatist, but impossible to pull off.

The fatal problem with “Mad Vincent” is that there’s not even a gradual collapse: This Vincent is mad from the outset. Cotton is asked to play scattered and angry from nearly his first line, and he can’t take the role anywhere. This also suggests an unchanging character, when the actual Van Gogh went through more character changes than you could fit in a novel. No artist in history, for example, accomplished such drastic stylistic shifts in such little time (a few years) as Van Gogh, and few allowed those shifts to be so visibly personal.

Here, it’s even difficult to glean that he may be a genuine artist; he seems to be just a lunatic young man with no social skills surrounded by other lunatics. A (fictional) fellow named Max the Actor (Brad Henson) indulges in long-winded, self-pitying monologues about how rough the actor’s life is.

As the itchy, nerve-racking Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, James Andrew Oster--understudying Richard Magram--plays at the same crazed decibel level as everyone else, and doesn’t even try for the under-5-foot Toulouse-Lautrec’s hobbled physical appearance. Oddest of all, he is depicted as a kind of rock star surrounded by hooker-groupies in a pop-style musical number.

There’s no flow between scenes, and even less of a sense of Van Gogh’s artistic process. For all of the wordy, breathless speeches, the play’s text never explores the heart of Van Gogh’s unfounded self-doubt in his own talent, his political idealism or the depths of his complex relationship with brother Theo (a weak Gary Iverson).

It’s even harder to fathom the general sloppiness, including factual errors that carry over into dramatic absurdity when Van Gogh fires several bullets into his chest (he actually shot himself once) and keeps standing and emoting for the long final scene.

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Where and When

What: “Mad Vincent.”

Location: Odessa Theatre, 10426 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursday to Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Ends Jan. 1.

Price: $14 Thursday to Saturday. $11 Sunday.

Call: (213) 660-8587.