Reworked ‘One Shoe Off’ a Portrait of Self-Absorbed

When Leonard and Dinah invite their neighbors over for a home-grown feast, they’re not kidding. They don’t even have to step outside to forage for food--not with all the vegetation running rampant through the interior of their upstate New York home in Tina Howe’s newly reworked absurdist comedy “One Shoe Off.”

Along with the dense foliage of Brian Alan Reed’s whimsical set, the clay feet of Howe’s eccentric theater couple are prominently displayed in this Lost World production at Gascon Center Theatre. Leonard (Alan Feinstein) is a former actor much given to brooding on his failed career; costume designer Dinah (Melissa Weber) is a flighty creative spirit who has a hard time coping with everyday logistics (like choosing what to wear from her array of flamboyant outfits). The disastrous state of their finances brings an added chill to the approaching winter as they prepare for a Thanksgiving dinner ripe with hidden motives.

Many of these center on their longtime friend, hotshot director and philandering egomaniac Parker Bliss (William Dennis Hunt). Also finding themselves at Leonard and Dinah’s tendril mercies are their new neighbors, an aspiring actress (Christine Burke) and her passive-aggressive husband (Cameron Watson), an editor who often speaks in nursery rhymes.

Howe typically eschews facile, endearing quirkiness for more complex portraits--even if it makes her characters less than likable. She has to dig deeper to find something admirable in these self-absorbed people, but ultimately succeeds--though just barely--with some surprising revelations about fidelity and tough-minded determination to survive.

With its curious mix of sharp-edged honesty and incongruous eruptions of existential farce, the piece strives to be a sort of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” as Ionesco might have penned it. Despite some invigorating performances (particularly from Hunt and Burke), Howe’s obsession with self-referential theater minutiae narrows her scope, and the jokes too often fall flat. Director Crystal Brian proves adept with the play’s character-based realism, but has difficulty harnessing its freewheeling monologues that drag covert motivations to the surface. Sometimes those are better left implicit--they don’t call it subtext for nothing.

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* “One Shoe Off,” Gascon Center Theatre, Helms Bakery Arts Complex, 738 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Oct. 5. $18. (213) 660-TKTS. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.