Reingold Get Explicit, Cerebral in ‘Girl Gone’

Given the considerable nudity and frank sexuality in Jacquelyn Reingold’s “Girl Gone,” you might expect to find it playing close to LAX rather than at Santa Monica’s City Garage.

It’s readily apparent, however, that Reingold and director Frederique Michel are after more cerebral game in this existential whodunit set amid the seedy world of strip clubs.

As a young stripper named Tish (Ames Ingham) searches for the killer of her girlfriend, Jean (Liz Davies), she begins to relive the victim’s troubled life and to confront her own deteriorating identity.

The men in Jean’s life--a smarmy gigolo (confidently played by Carlos Ernesto Alvarado) and a sinister sax player (Stephen Pocock)--begin to figure more prominently for Tish than her own innocuous but clueless boyfriend (John McMahon), and by the play’s end she’s perilously close to replicating her friend’s fate.

A trio of strippers (Istar Uhvana, Marcie Rich and Liz Hight) form an unusually risque Greek chorus, providing both ironic commentary and welcome comic relief.

The surreal, fragmented dialogue and hazy chronology lend ambiguity to Michel’s stylized staging, dissipating the erotic charge in a chilling metaphorical world of dissociation in which, as one character puts it, “there is no more why--only how.”

* “Girl Gone,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 (alley) 4th St., Santa Monica. Fridays, Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends April 28. $17.50 (Sundays pay-what-you-can). (310) 319-9939. Running time: 2 hours.