‘Us’ Succeeds in Shocking Audience

“Us,” Karen Malpede’s very long one-act drama at City Garage in Santa Monica, seems intended to shock. It succeeds. Shock is certainly an appropriate response to something this pretentious and overblown.

Two actors, Christy Murray and Nicholas Mitsakis, play a total of six characters from two miserably depraved families. Jewish American Hannah (Murray) recalls in flashback a nightmarish ‘50s childhood filled with sickening incidents of incest and domestic abuse. Her lover Michel (Mitsakis), a French Algerian, similarly suffered as the object of his mother’s disgust and his brother’s lust.

Influenced by the work of Jean Genet, Malpede shares the avant-garde writer’s penchant for mixing the personal and political (e.g., Hannah and Michel’s troubled love affair is presented as a metaphor for Arab-Jewish relations). But allusions to the atomic bomb and the Algerian civil war feel forced, as does Malpede’s crude and repetitive handling of the characters’ dysfunctions. What exactly is the point of all this degradation?

Director Frederique Michel’s production indulges the script’s every excess, including cross-dressing, simulated sex and full-frontal nudity. Murray and Mitsakis deserve some sort of award for enduring two uninterrupted hours of this junk.

But then, so do we.

* “Us,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St., Santa Monica. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 17. $15. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 2 hours.