THEATER REVIEW : A Comedy That Courts Disaster

The idea behind the comedy “Belladonnas of the Court,” at American Renegade Theatre Company, sounds promising.

Tenants who are unaware that they are neighbors but who share a courtyard in the Fairfax District are suddenly united when their cartoonishly designed bungalows are about to be demolished in the name of greed.

These people are a little like bizarre characters out of the Hollywood novel “The Day of the Locust.” There’s an aging, sardonic Jewish resident (Allen Bloomfield) who sounds like a poor man’s Jackie Mason. His blind, sunglass-wearing wife (Shannon Welles), who “sees” more than she lets on, continually swings a broom about her head, brandishing it in place of a guide dog.

Across the courtyard with its sad, wilting palm resides an anxious young married couple, the garrulous Danny Lippin and the squealy Alex Cain. They are each lured into an adulterous fling--the husband with a tenant in the back of the courtyard who’s an affable hooker (the towering Taylor Phillips) and the wife with the lascivious landlord (the roguish and rather funny Barry Thompson), who’s trying to kick them all out and put up a modern building.

So far, on paper, the play, by Mark M. Troy, doesn’t sound too bad.

Then why is watching this dubious comedy so exasperating, if not painful? How does one count the ways?

Certainly, the idea of apartment-dwelling strangers thrown into co-dependency is a workable plot, embellished in this case by David Marling’s vivid sound design and Sirina Wong’s clever set design, right down to the demolished bungalows in Act II.

Even the acting, by and large, is not too destructive, given the material and the young husband and courtyard chatterbox who are unusually tiresome. Their grueling banter alone takes up the first half-hour.

It’s not exactly unlocking one of the show’s great mysteries to lay failure clearly on Troy’s writing, which includes a laborious, embarrassing subplot about sex capers, which are bafflingly improbable, even for nonsense like this. That, in turn, is exacerbated by director Larry Gilman, who’s at a loss as to how to turn this sow’s ear into a silk purse.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Belladonnas of the Court.”

Location: American Renegade Theatre Company, 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Benefit performances at 8 p.m. Thursday, May 18 and 25, and June 1 and 8.

Price: $12 to $15; benefit performances $20.

Call: (818) 763-4430.