Big Ideas, Half-Baked

Staged readings of new plays, like those at the Orange County Playwrights Alliance at the Vanguard Theatre on Saturday, are concerned with only one question: Does the play work? Never mind the actors, the staging, the pace. The play, the script in the actors’ hands, is the thing.

The four plays that made up “Discoveries at the Vanguard” display a common interest in mythologies, entertainment history and jettisoning psychological realism. But there’s work to be done, starting with Richard Freedman’s “Hope Chest,” a whimsical but weak attempt to place feuding Greek gods in suburbia.

With rebellious brother Prometheus (Michael Buss) chained to a rock in the backyard for delivering fire to humans, Epimetheus (Greg Lipford) makes a deal with Zeus (Tom Swimm, who directed): Take a wife, Pandora (Diane Sawyers), and store a mysterious box in the garage. New neighbor Eve (Laura Nagata-Murphy) tempts Pandora to open it, unleashing all the world’s evils--”avarice, sloth, pride, tabloid journalism.” But the box also contains hope, which Pandora unleashes in a moment of optimism.

It’s an interesting ending to a comedy that’s much too in love with its own cleverness and seems too imitative of television’s “3rd Rock From the Sun.” Freedman’s dialogue is only occasionally funny, but at least his storytelling ends on a mysterious note.

Writer-director Jordan R. Young is a fine writer of dialogue, as shown by his engaging “Demon in Paradise,” in which legendary New York scribe Damon Runyon (Gene Fiskin, who delivered an uncommonly developed, commanding performance for a staged reading) plies his charms with both screenwriter pal Lenny (Vince Campbell) and waitress Molly (Christina Lynn Moorhead).

Young’s trick is to insinuate a Runyonesque situation into Runyon’s own life: While Runyon tries to contend with living in hated L.A., thuggish Eddie (K. Robert Eaton) nearly throws a wrench in the works. This looks like a one-act with a future.

Christopher Trela also inserts pop culture figures into his comedy about comedy, “You Bet Your Life,” directed by Adam Clark. Brandon Crane’s Blake is a stand-up comic whose failure amuses his former wife but alerts the clashing comic spirits of Groucho Marx (Clark) and Lenny Bruce (K.C. Mercer).

Groucho’s offer of eternal fame is hardly as tempting as Bruce’s more devilish offer of fame and freedom from guilt as a stand-up, but this also isn’t as interesting as how Trela has Groucho and Bruce debate comedy philosophy. “You Bet” is a hip, ‘90s update of a Shavian exchange of ideas, but it tends to drown out Blake, who does gain fame but isn’t terribly intriguing.

The oddity of Eric Eberwein’s play begins with its title: “Sexual Iowa.” Cramming a lot of various takes on sex into less than 10 minutes--and doing it in rhyming verse, no less--Eberwein depicts once-randy couple Bill (K. Robert Eaton, who directed) and Ruth (Paulette Kendall) transported from libidinous California into sexually repressed Iowa, ruled by patriarch Gene (Vince Campbell).

Gene’s wife, Jenny (Moorhead), and daughter Timmy (Sienna Spencer) get a whiff, though, of the couple’s sexual freedom, and they want out of Iowa.

Too brief and unnecessarily frantic, “Sexual Iowa” blurs its sexual politics in a flurry of stylistic overkill. But Eberwein suggests an ambition, that once disciplined, could create something amazing.