‘Skin’ Gives Teutonic Tale Modern Look

Jones is the kind of guy who attracts trouble. If he hangs out on the street, the police will beat him up. If he’s minding his own business working at the factory, his boss will verbally abuse him. Finally, and with results most devastating, his girl will betray him.

Jones is a modern-day Southern Californian version of Georg Buchner’s “Woyzeck,” as updated by writer Naomi Iizuka, who renames the play “Skin.” This visually arresting and bravely acted production at the Los Angeles Playhouse establishes the Relentless Theatre--which last year gave us the equally depressive “Crackwalker”--as L.A.’s most relentlessly gritty company. Here, the cast digs its teeth into the morose, Teutonic, fatalistic, pre-Prozac vision of the 23-year-old Buchner. “Woyzeck” was his last play; he died before finishing it in 1836.

“Skin” is necessarily lethargic, dramatically. Jones’ only real activity is philosophizing. And when he finally is compelled to take concrete action, it is a violent and cowardly thing.

Working with Iizuka’s moody, ambling text, director Olivia Honegger creates a stylish tableau of urban angst. Twelve characters inhabit the clubs, street and factory of the story. These places are all represented on a large, flat space that looks like an artist’s loft, filled with found art objects, iron and corrugated tin. This is an unmonied nether world where sexual betrayal, violence and strange poetry all sit close to the surface.

Here, Jones (Alex Fernandez) is buffeted about, incessantly brooding with large, mournful eyes. It’s a wonder that his youthful, hardened girlfriend Mary has allowed him to hang around as long as she has. She’s already beginning to stray in her mind as the play starts.

As Mary, Rachel Malkenhorst, who was memorably unsettling in “The Crackwalker,” is again commanding. She is a hungry sensualist, a woman who can lie with a man on pavement and dream of the heavens while enduring cuts in her skin from glass strewn about. She combines a lively libido with a stone-cold practicality that makes her maddeningly unknowable, a viable obsession for a man like Jones, for whom all knowledge turns to dust. As her chum, a ditsy prostitute named Lisa, Andrea Portes is slyly funny as a woman so practiced at displaying her sexual charms that her cognition is always a beat slow.

As good as some of the character sketches are here, the drama remains stubbornly desultory and seems to amble rather than march toward the inevitable.

Jones is a trapped Everyman, a powerless philosopher, who is so attuned to death that he can imagine how things would sound from underneath the ground. His father once threw him in the ocean, it seems. At times, “Skin” seems as if it is underwater too, lugubrious but with moments of unreal beauty.

* “Skin,” Relentless Theatre Company, Los Angeles Playhouse, 1625 N. La Brea Ave., Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends July 18. $15. (310) 289-2287. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.