‘Bean Team’ a Mixed Bag

Like an inner child finally breaking out of a subdued adult, a wild piece of pure theater eventually explodes out of what actor-writer Steve Bean calls “The Bean Team Anthology,” at Eclectic Company Theatre.

You’re never quite sure where Bean’s show is going, and you even realize that the advance word that this is a one-man performance is wrong. (Bean actually has two key supporting players in Steve Scionti and Kevin Black, but more on that in a moment.) Keeping us guessing, quashing expectations--these are good things. Making us sit through what amounts to a long, barely amusing expository monologue-introduction to the main event--this is not a good thing.

Under Roger Cox’s direction and backed by a truly ugly, V-shaped set, Bean first explains how he got into theater in spite of and not because of his studies at the highly regarded Carnegie Mellon University drama school in the late ‘70s. In movement class, for example, “we didn’t move,” he says, and instead did all sorts of useless things with facial and limb contortions. Theatre school hell.

So Bean and his buddies--whose in-crowd chant to each other was uttering “Beeeeaaan!” like a foghorn (a gag so overused here it nearly kills his monologue)--made their own theater, at home. The audience would sit on one side of a doorway, the actors would play on the other side of the threshold, turning the doorway itself into a miniature proscenium arch. They called it “Theatre du Rien (Theatre of Nothing).”

Bean peppers this long memoir with jokey asides about too many bong hits and acid trips, with a kind of undergraduate sloth mentality that’s a lot funnier to the one who went through it than anybody else. Besides, where is this going?

Surprise: Bean, with Scionti and Black, re-create highlights of Theatre du Rien. Before our dazzled eyes, using the simplest of effects, the Bean Team transforms the space into a crazy vortex of jarring, shifting images. Scenes may take as little as 10 seconds, start and stop with quick blackouts, and even create the illusion of defying gravity. Blending mime, dance, silent movies, echoes of the great underground band the Residents and psychedelia ‘70s-style (watch what’s done with six lit cigarettes in the dark), Bean and crew suggest how wild and free theater can be if you leave your inhibitions at the door.

By the time it’s over and you’re wondering what else can be done with black lights and glow-in-the-dark thingies, you also realize that this may be the year’s most schizoid show. Solo monologues have never sounded duller, and handmade theater has never looked better.

* “The Bean Team Anthology,” Eclectic Theatre Company, 5312 Laurel Canyon Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 23. (818) 753-3302.