Stage Light

Gay Goodenough’s solo show, “Can’t Get Enough,” runs less than 90 minutes at Burbank’s Third Stage, but before it’s over, another bad pun on the writer-performer’s last name is likely to come up: Enough already.

A strange, murky melange of comic stand-up material, self-confessional and poeticized word spew, “Can’t Get Enough” could work only if it were designed as a parody of L.A.’s unending epidemic of one-person shows.

This solo form is by now so overdone and abused that the only honest and original approach is to turn it back on itself. Even this may not really be original, since this self-reflexive attack on the solo show was first done more than 10 years ago by such disparate performers as Steven Berkoff and Kedric Robin Wolfe.

“Can’t Get Enough” is merely a reminder of how many unemployed actors are struggling out there, and that while some wait tables, others put on their own shows if they can find the backing and an available theater. Third Stage is apparently quite available, since Goodenough has been presenting her show there weekly since last April.

By all rights, that many weekly shows should be enough--sorry--to work out the kinks, but no such luck. Goodenough comes on as a woman profoundly addicted to chocolate, placing a phone order to Pink Dot for more chocolates. She then waxes philosophical: “Rat race! What about the human race? Where do I find me in all of this?” Eventually, an offstage Voice of Reason (blankly delivered by Jacki Houghton) speaks our thoughts, first uttering, “Who cares?” then “You’re rambling.”

Goodenough, alas, doesn’t listen, and keeps on rambling. She offers weak recollections of kids rejecting her early in life, of realizing she was lesbian at 14, confessing that she tends to get involved with people too soon for her own good, that she hates “the Hollywood scene,” that she married a man she didn’t love. In grab-bag fashion, she dons a frizzy wig meant to make her look like “Cher’s demented sister.”

It’s a mess, in other words, except for a brief section in which Goodenough allows her abilities as a stand-up comic to take over. Here, she pokes fun at herself (“I’m not bi-polar, I’m just a whiner”) in ways that finally invite us into her world. Suddenly, pretensions fall away, and verbal timing sharpens and clicks along. Sadly, it doesn’t last long, and a creaky form of self-pity overwhelms the show. Houghton is credited as co-writer, though because the material is so totally solipsistic, it’s hard to sense an outsider’s voice. A director is not credited, and the absence shows.

“Can’t Get Enough,” Third Stage, 2811 Magnolia Blvd., Burbank. Sundays, 7 p.m. Runs indefinitely. $10. (323) 664-9150. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.