Macabre Deconstruction of Little Red Riding Hood

An appreciation for Grimm fairy tales (the grimmer the better), Alfred Hitchcock and the pedantic excesses of Structuralism all come in handy for tracking “The Universal Wolf” at Santa Monica’s City Garage.

Joan Schenkar’s new post-modernist fable puts a macabre, satiric spin on “Little Red Riding Hood,” framing it in the heady context of social anthropology as several principal characters get deconstructed along with the myth. The irony is sustained through a nerdy, bespectacled narrator (Michael Trent), who supplies music and wacky sound effects along with a jargon-laden analysis of the story’s cultural significance.

Taking Structuralist tenets to their logical absurdity, this theoretical model proves not only opaque to the participants but also irrelevant as well. As the dapper Monsieur Woolf (Nathan Dana) notes in one of his frequent asides, “The meaning of my obsession has no meaning for me.”

Instead of wrestling with philosophical issues, he’s more intent on foisting rewrites on the narrator to make the outcome more favorable to his designs on the luscious Ms. Hood (Liz Hight). Representing the heroine as a fully grown woman (signature cloak draped alluringly over a matching red cocktail dress) and the wolf as a charmer with a self-control problem provides comic opportunities for both performers. Hight is particularly effective as she ricochets between cerebral pouting and hopeless ditziness. Marcie Rich is an addled and vaguely ominous Grandmother, a retired butcher who might at any time resume her career.

This amusing romp nevertheless isn’t above lapsing into the same pretentiousness it lampoons. In brief pronouncements by Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other prominent Structuralist thinkers (all played by Bo Roberts), playwright Schenkar reveals she’s done plenty of lapping at this academic trough before biting the hand that’s fed her. The play’s ultimate entropic dissolution is the only way out of the intellectual corner into which this particular school of thought has painted itself.

* “The Universal Wolf,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 (alley) 4th St., Santa Monica. Fridays, Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends Jan. 21. $15, Sundays pay-what-you-can. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.