A 3-Act Walk Through L.A.’s Desperate Corners

The Chandler Studio Theatre used to be entirely dependent on founder Michael Holmes’ creative juices. If they flowed, out came a new play, such as “Ryder” or “The Ring.” If they didn’t . . . you waited until they did.

The North Hollywood venue may be less dependent on Holmes’ hyphenate skills as playwright-director now that he has organized a new company. The company has put up its first production, “Berserk in L.A.,” and it is characteristically interesting.

The evening of three one-acts, under Holmes’ direction, courses through sometimes underclass but always desperate corners of Los Angeles. Bookended by readings of Wallace Stevens’ poem about the moon’s maddening qualities, “Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks,” the plays center on people who have fallen off the middle-class success track. Mike Davis’ doom and gloom book on Los Angeles, “City of Quartz,” would make a fitting companion tome for this program.

Kevin Kling’s “21A,” previously performed at the Humana Festival of New Plays, conforms to certain stereotypes that non-Angelenos have about the city, starting with the notion that the place is full of crazies. Kling’s group rides a bus, No. 21A, and nearly all of them are yakkers. Not even a shooting and robbery shut them up completely.

The device here is that we see one character at a time, as each lives the minutes between when the bus driver goes to get coffee and the shooting. Tony Adelman plays the driver, the robber and his victims. The effect is slightly “Rashomon”-like, only with the added quality of hearing two sides of a dialogue at different points in the performance. It’s alternately dizzying, funny and also strained, especially since Adelman is far more convincing in some guises (surprisingly, as an elderly gossiping wife) than in others (a drunken homeless guy).

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While Kling’s breakup of conventional narrative does capture some of the city’s schizoid nature, Marisa Cody goes for a straight account in her play, “Topless,” about a dancer at a Century City gentlemen’s club. The title is metaphoric; the dancer, played by Cody, is more mindless, in the sense that she’s wasted and lost her mind to a world of exploitation. She knows better, but feels trapped.

Cody invents someone the dancer can talk to: the club’s backstage “house mother” (Corinne Tandy), who silently listens to the story of how a college-educated woman descended into the world of topless and lap dancing. It’s an interesting device for an overly familiar tale, which Cody the actor humanizes with a sinewy and stubborn--but probably futile--determination.

A story by an anonymous homeless woman trying to survive in Newport Beach (originally published in The Times) becomes a quietly gripping stage work titled “Hell on Wheels.” Ann Thomas Moore plays Diane, a professional editor whose world is dissolving, with a steely calm that gradually gives way to panic.

The text describes Diane’s day-to-day routine of sleeping in her car, penny-pinching for food, washing in a public restroom, and watching her dignity collapse. The irony of how her life went south after sacrificing for her Alzheimer’s-stricken father is compounded by her homelessness in one of L.A.’s most posh ‘burbs--which still doesn’t prevent it from being a terrifying place at night. Diane’s growing fear engulfs us, care of some very creepy music by Joel Bender. It’s the kind of focused work that brings out the best in Holmes as director.

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Berserk in L.A.”

* WHERE: The Chandler Studio Theatre, 12443 Chandler Blvd., North Hollywood.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. 7 p.m. Sundays.

* HOW MUCH: $10.

* CALL: (818) 409-9550.