Actor Succeeds With the Stuff of Silliness

There isn’t a trailer park within a short tow of their neighborhood, but the Toluca Lake Players have quite a thing for mobile homes. The group’s recent production, “Turtle Tears,” was a melodrama set in and around a trailer park, as is “Chug,” the first of a pair of one-acts currently at the Players’ Taber Theatre.

Chug, played by Suthern Hayes, who also wrote “Turtle Tears,” swigs beer like water and tries to stuff a ridiculous amount of food into his already overstuffed refrigerator. You don’t realize it at the time, but the play essentially is Chug building up to an explanation for all the small, foil-wrapped objects in his fridge.

Writer-director Kirk Jordan has Chug function silently on stage for the first few minutes (except when he’s calling out for his female mate, Frida). Then he lets Chug break the fourth wall and directly address the audience. It’s a risky trick that here feels forced.

Once Hayes settles in, however, he gives a performance that acknowledges the character’s absurdity. Chug’s inane series of encounters and experiences--climaxing with being stuck with 10,000 bullfrogs he and Frida can’t get rid of--remain quaintly funny rather than moronic. It’s a fine line, but Hayes keeps this guy’s inflated view of himself as a great entrepreneur in check. It’s a performance without ridicule, fitting for a piece about a fellow letting his heart get out of control.

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The second one-act, “Porch,” is also about hearts--those of a mother and daughter--but now we’ve shifted to a house without wheels. (The uncredited set, with minimal flats, however, barely suggests this.)

This “Porch,” by Jack Heifner, is not to be confused with another brilliant one-act by Jeffrey Sweet with the same title. That piece was an emotionally powerful depiction of a daughter, her father and her past lover, all set on a porch.

Heifner’s action is also on a porch, in a hot Texas town, observing chatty, aging Dot (Teddy Vincent) and her bitter, bored daughter Lucille (Chelsea Taylor). Lucille wants to read the paper, but Dot wants to talk. Sweating, unhealthy looking, trapped in a wheelchair, Dot’s need to talk gradually appears to be her way to hold on to life. She’s a Bible Belt cousin of Samuel Beckett’s desperately talkative old people.

Lucille is a more vague creature, and Heifner doesn’t really have a feel for her. When Dot’s chattiness becomes less revealing of character and more meandering, the playwright makes Lucille stand up for her own character, as if she were the next batter at the plate. It gives this nearly hourlong dialogue an artificial feeling, though; if she stayed true to herself, Lucille would just leave the old gal and go back inside. Instead, Lucille ends up screaming, wanting to escape.

With Jan O’Connor directing, Taylor makes this last-minute histrionics emotionally true, even if the writing doesn’t convince. Vincent doesn’t always keep Dot’s talk from becoming boring, but the woman’s core of desperation heats and bubbles up in this actor with real conviction. Good actors can’t save bad plays, but here they’ve improved a problematic one.

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Chug” and “Porch.”

* WHERE: Taber Theatre, Toluca Lake United Methodist Church, 4301 N. Cahuenga Blvd.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays.

* HOW MUCH: $12.

* CALL: (818) 508-7084.