Comic Mutations Resuscitate ‘Bad Seed’

When 8-year-old Rhoda calls Leroy, her decrepit apartment house janitor, “a very silly man,” she’s right on the money. But that’s precisely the point--the sneering, black-toothed Leroy is played by a woman, Kris Strobeck, in Minneapolis-based Theatre 911’s hilarious camp revival of Maxwell Anderson’s “Bad Seed” at the St. Genesius Theatre.

Then again, Rhoda has few grounds for complaint, seeing how this little sociopathic murderess is herself played by director Danny Schmitz, a 6-foot-tall man.

Gender-bending is just the start of the production’s comic mutations on Anderson’s dated and astonishingly bad script. Wayne Wilderson scores a manic bull’s-eye as the bereaved parents of one of Rhoda’s victims, flopping around the tacky apartment set as the hysterical, drunken mother and switching to a hand-puppet for her stern, colorless husband. A nerdy next-door know-it-all (Peter Brietmayer) provides endless exposition from his motorized, airbag-equipped wheelchair/scooter.

The landlady (Mary Jo Pehl), an amateur “Froodian” analyst, diagnoses everyone’s problems in delicious psychobabble, including a “larvated homosexual” (an anything-but-larvated Steve Alden). Maile Flanagan and Melissa Denton round out the eccentric supporting characters.

Deadpan Andrea Beutner is superb as Rhoda’s glum, befuddled mother, who discovers the key to her daughter’s evil nature in her own secret lineage. Chalk one up for the Darwinists (the family’s unwavering diet of cupcakes and cheap beer notwithstanding).

Charles Johnson serves as a “Facilitator” perched atop the refrigerator, initiating unnecessary and sometimes distracting audience participation and, more importantly, following the action in the script and flagging any deviations with dropped tissues. It’s a subtle and effective way of pointing out how much of the dopiness lies in the original dialogue. When the Legion of Decency banned the work in 1957, it may well have had the right idea for all the wrong reasons.

* “Bad Seed,” St. Genesius Theatre, 1049 N. Havenhurst, West Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 25. $18. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.