Local Playwrights Turn Out Uneven Collection

While a few Valley theaters have a steady stable of actors, fewer still also have a company of playwrights. That’s true anywhere in regional theater, and the reason is simple: Playwrights, being scarcer than actors, go where the work can be done. Theaters that provide a place and time to work keep loyal playwrights. (Witness Justin Tanner, who virtually lives at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood.)

Interact Theatre Company was set up by actors, but it’s become playwright-friendly. Its playwriting group has turned out a regular stream of long and short produced work, and “Last Gasp,” hatched by workshop member Jaime Klein, is the latest in the stream.

Klein came up with the idea of playlets depicting couples waiting in judge’s chambers before they get divorced (thus, the “last gasp” for saving their marriages). It’s curious that she would choose such a theme since her approach is generally the most superficial of her colleagues.

Her “Rhapsody in Rhinestones” (directed by Alan Brooks, with Sharon Madden and Sandy Kenyon) is a lame and disheartening opener. Her Act II opener, “The Twitch,” (directed by Kenyon, with Brooks and Carol Mayo Jenkins) reveals a pattern of depicting silly, even hateful, women and going for the cheap laugh. Klein’s other piece, “The In-Betweeners,” (co-written with Richard Broadhurst) is too slight to even qualify as a running gag.

Cybele May’s “The Intercession,” directed by Marilyn McIntyre, builds to a macabre, religious point, as Paul Perri’s philandering husband wants out of wedlock with his hyperfaithful Christian wife (Rachel Griffin). It’s hard to tell how well May writes comic characters, but she knows how to write an ending.

Leigh Podgorski, we’re told in the program, is developing a whole screenplay out of “Western Song,” which right now is all back story and no play. Janis Chow’s performance of the mail-order bride suggests some past pain, but Dave Florek as her cowboy husband doesn’t generate the cross-cultural passion that seems to have inspired Podgorski in the first place. Pete Zapp directed.

By far the evening’s most disturbing and complete work, Broadhurst’s “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” keeps us off kilter as much as the character of Joanne (McIntyre), who must contend with a deviously manipulative husband (James Harper). Finally, under Dan Kern’s direction, we feel a couple really going through the throes of divorce, but the throes underlying Broadhurst’s psychodrama are much deeper than that.

Jule Selbo imagines what a lesbian couple must go through, nullifying a marriage that isn’t actually legal, in “Two Not So Tall Women,” directed by Carol Mayo Jenkins. Like most parting couples, there’s one who wants to stay together (Denise Bessette) and one who needs to move on (Christal Lockwood), and the fight is funny enough until a thoroughly unconvincing happy ending--a bothersome feel-good trend in much of the evening.

Hogan Sheffer’s screenwriting couple in “The Pitch” can’t possibly stay together, but James Gleason as “Him” is nevertheless going to make one last pitch to ultracynical Amanda Carlin’s “Her.” (Writer characters apparently don’t rate names.) Like the couple’s own Hollywood stuff, the piece is all cute high concept, under Tony Rizzoli’s direction.

Actors Eddie Jones and Annie Abbott, guided by Anita Khanzadian, make Michael Robert David’s “Last Tango in Brooklyn” hum with life and a warmth only veterans can generate. Abbott’s wife is perhaps the evening’s most interesting woman, someone who just up and left one day out of sense of feeling, as she says, “sad.” Jones’ husband, swinging between desperation and concern, makes us believe that he can save a marriage. For once, an earned happy ending.

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Last Gasp.”

* WHERE: Interact Theatre Company, 11855 Hart St., North Hollywood.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Thursdays. Ends April 11.

* HOW MUCH: $12.

* CALL: (213) 466-1767 or (818) 953-9993.