‘Little Plays’ Requires a Bigger, More Audible Effort

Husband and wife producer-director team Joe Salazar and Lawrin Goulston debut their Los Angeles theater production company with “Little Plays . . . Big Playwrights,” a two-part series of one-acts at the McCadden Theatre.

Evening A begins with “The Long Goodbye,” Tennessee Williams’ sentimental retread about a young writer who faces life on his own after his troubled family’s dissolution. Unless you are an experienced lip reader or familiar with the play, you might as well catch a mime show.

Two-thirds of the actors are unintelligible. Apparently, director Goulston neglected to tell her cast that audibility--in the theater at least--is key. Because of its incomprehensibility and awkward staging, Goulston’s opener sends Evening A plummeting downhill.

The second offering, Richard Greenberg’s “Life Under Water,” lightly taps the brakes on the evening’s precipitous decline. Directed by Salazar, the play is set in the Hamptons, where the wealthy set gropes futilely for love in the summer sun.

Audibility is still a problem here too, especially among the younger performers, Alyson Croft, Ann O’Leary and James Calvert, appealingly natural actors who require firmer directorial guidance. Veteran performers Jill Jaress and Jeffrey David Pomerantz, who play trim yet aging Hamptonites involved in an extramarital affair, almost salvage Greenberg’s flimsy and reiterative piece.

Alberto Innaurato’s “The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie,” also directed by Salazar, closes the evening--more than three hours and two intermissions later. Innaurato’s former Obie winner about a morbidly obese young boy seems dated and vile, a vision of brutalized humanity lower than Gorky’s, yet devoid of depth.

Melissa Van Der Schyff has compelling moments as a troubled 12-year-old sexpot; as the obese boy’s pedophile grandfather, Greg Mullavey shows guts and ingenuity in essaying the genuinely creepy. However, Salazar’s ham-handed staging further blunts Innaurato’s repugnant pointlessness.

* “Little Plays . . . Big Playwrights: Evening A,” McCadden Theatre, 1157 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m. through July 5. Beginning July 13, Saturdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. through July 28. $18. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 3 hours, 20 minutes.