‘Meat’ Is Funny Fable of Dogs, Gazelles

Lured by a piece of meat, three stray dogs meet in an alley. In the nearby zoo, three female gazelles set their sights on a different kind of meat--the male of the species. Eventually the animals’ fates intertwine, with calamitous results for most of them.

It may sound grim, but the tone of Ethan Lipton’s “Meat,” at the Powerhouse Theatre, is jauntily satirical. Chuckles are abundant. Steve Chabon’s staging of this ingenious little fable for Buffalo Nights Theatre Company is full of bright, funny performances, hampered only by a couple of structural problems in the play itself.

As the play opens, Heinz (Gibson Frazier), a German shepherd and police dog, is abandoned by his master--not a particularly plausible circumstance, but one that doesn’t do serious damage to the play. At least the cop left Heinz with a big, juicy burger--which soon attracts the attention of the mutt Willy (Maury Sterling) and the pit bull Poopsy (Julie Ann Taylor).

Yet Heinz wants to move beyond meat. He’s determined to free himself from the shackles of his appetite. Soon his ardent arguments pierce Poopsy’s ferocious attitude, and she joins his crusade. Willy, less of a convert, is still willing to play along, up to a point.

Meanwhile, the queen of the gazelle pen, Babette (Jodi Johnson), and her gal pal Evelyn (Evie Peck) look with disdain at the young newcomer Clara (Laurel Moglen) and her large rear end. They sneer at this new rival for the sexual favors of the male gazelles. The scheming begins.

Dogs and gazelles don’t mingle until almost the end of the play, though there is a brief moment early on when Heinz apparently has a premonition of Clara welcoming him into her pen. But this scene is too slight to matter.

For the most part, the action repeatedly cuts from one set of animals to the other. The blackouts during these transitions slow down the show, which otherwise maintains a crisp comic pacing within the individual scenes.

One other problem is that the final twist of the plot suggests that human society is above the fray, while the play’s previous thrust is to suggest that human society is, in fact, the model for this fray.

Certainly the actors don’t go to great lengths to mimic dogs and gazelles. These are two-legged creatures with mostly human characteristics. Costumes resemble human uniforms--this isn’t “Cats.” The few distinctively animalistic gestures the actors make are all the funnier because they’re scarce.

Frazier’s wide-eyed sincerity as the somewhat neurotic Heinz enlists the audience’s sympathies more than anyone else. Sterling’s mutt is more doglike, with Taylor’s Poopsy torn between the two. The pampered gazelles are funny but appalling.

By the way, this isn’t the first time the Powerhouse Theatre has gone to the dogs. In 1990, actors there portrayed canines in an adaptation of “The Call of the Wild.”

* “Meat,” Powerhouse Theatre, 3112 2nd St., Santa Monica. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends April 6. $12.50. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.