‘Impact This!’ Skewers Pop Platitudes

Talk about ungrateful offspring! It seems the principal characters in “Impact This!”--Leslie Caveny’s hilariously biting new play at Theatre West--would go to any length to escape their own creator.

Even murder. In the first 10 minutes the heroine, an unnamed feminist artist-turned-terroristplayed by Caveny herself, falls in love with the affable but clueless bystander she was supposed to assassinate. When the irate playwright (portrayed by Catherine MacNeal) protests, her creation turns the gun on her instead.

It’s the kind of fourth wall penetration that could easily prove a gimmick in less skillful hands, but Caveny has an unerring instinct for effectively breaking the rules. She cleverly employs her characters’ pursuit of independent fulfillment to skewer pop psychology platitudes about relationships, indulgence without consequences, and glibly reinvented identity.

Ditching her scripted suicidal gloom for romance, Caveny’s artist moves in with her new true love (an engaging Steve O’Connor) and happily switches to painting flowers instead of dismembered bodies.

But even fictional characters can’t escape their past baggage, and a gradual souring of her mood sends the artist once again in search of her author to discover the hidden traumas in her own back story.

The edgy, sharp-tongued Caveny is an ideal performer for her own quirky material, and here she’s surrounded by a uniformly enjoyable cast under Deborah LaVine’s crisp, energetic direction.

“Impact This!” never ventures beyond the confines of middle-class Angst --subsistence issues never intrude on its characters’ quests for self-definition, for example. But Caveny covers her terrain with dazzling ingenuity, wit and economy--there isn’t a wasted moment in this world premiere with plenty of, well, impact.

* “Impact This!,” Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends March 26. $15. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.