Valley Weekend : THEATER REVIEW : Ambitious, Unfulfilled Effort by Man Wearing ‘4 Faces,’ 2 Hats : Peter Mark Richman is both author and actor in the production. He’s got the characters down, but needs to give them a better script.

Plays used to open in Boston and New Haven, before they really opened in New York. Now plays open anywhere. Peter Mark Richman’s play “4 Faces,” for example, opened last spring at Orange’s Chapman College. It was an odd little semi-out-of-town tryout, clearly a work-in-progress, with a lot of progress still needed.

“4 Faces” is now at the Ventura Court Theatre, but the only real progress has been a more intimate venue. If there has been any trimming or refining of the text, it’s undetectable.

In any case, text trimming wasn’t--and isn’t--the show’s problem. Richman’s effort as both writer and solo performer to unify four portraits of extremely different men remains ambitious, tantalizing and unfulfilled.

Richman begins with Pastor Harlan Gregory, a stern Bible thumper who sounds a lot like Sen. Bob Packwood as he defends himself at the pulpit against charges of fooling around. Then Carlo talks at an Alanon meeting, not so much about himself, but about his son’s descent into drugs and death.

After intermission, Richman’s Gerhardt Muller cradles a snifter of brandy in his palm while coolly explaining to an unseen visitor how he deported thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps. Finally, Daniel is an elderly Jewish widower and unlikely survivor of the very evil Muller helped inflict.

Of the four faces, two have nothing in common, while two share a terrible legacy. Put another way (and borrowing from set designer Craig Brown’s four standing flats of painted cameos), two are isolated portraits, while two are woven together like a tapestry. Act II’s drama simply blows away the play’s first half, and it’s a mystery why Richman has planned things this way.

The only four-way link is a shared crisis of faith in God, but the theme sometimes feels arbitrarily inserted, as with Gerhardt, whose character is otherwise incapable of such self-reflection. We feel this crisis most with Carlo, but his drama is also tritely melodramatic. The good pastor’s double problem with God and women is very old, predictable stuff. Daniel’s problems, though, are eloquently sad.

What the playwright can’t bring together, the actor does. Richman plays the pastor as he might Nixon--on the offensive, self-servingly confessional, shooting down his congregation (us) with long stares. His Carlo is a borderline caricature of an Italian-American father, while his Gerhardt superbly transcends what could have been another caricature of the bad, bad Nazi. The choicest actor’s moment, though, is Richman’s shift from the Nazi to Daniel, a chummier sort than the kind of cold, stock character Richman has specialized in for years on TV.

Richman changes costumes onstage, and while we’re continuously reminded of the actor’s art, Richman now needs to pay more attention to the playwright’s art. In this way, “4 Faces” still feels like it’s out of town.

* “4 Faces,” Ventura Court Theatre, 12417 Ventura Court, Studio City. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 15. $15. (213) 466-1767.