Unlikely Characters Collide in Fanciful ‘World’

Playwrights who mix disparate characters from history and legend in fanciful settings often become too amused by their own erudite jokes and neglect the audience’s needs for coherence, connection--and footnotes. Such is the case with Jeffrey Dorchen’s “Ugly’s First World,” at the Actors’ Gang’s El Centro space.

The title character is a zombie, fresh out of hell, along with two comrades, Cruel and Stupid. Ugly soon learns that no one is very happy in heaven or on Earth. Aleister Crowley, the Satanist, is plotting to overthrow God. T.S. Eliot has lost his sense of poetry and taken a job as a coroner. Eliot’s niece Ligeia Usher (brush up on your Poe before you encounter this character) is going through that awkward phase when her body keeps ripping apart and a new Ligeia is born from within. Inside Lord Greystoke, Tarzan yearns to breathe free, and Lady Greystoke dreams about Eliot and Crowley.

All of this follows a first scene in which a woman vomits and lets loose a streak of scatalogical imagery about Jesus, only to vanish for the rest of the play.

Dorchen’s larger point is something about the struggle to rediscover passion in a world bereft of it. But it’s swallowed up by a surfeit of more-educated-than-thou references and by the sheer number of characters and lack of cohesion in describing exactly what’s going on.

Bill Cusack’s energetic staging gets a fierce performance from Christopher Gerson as Ugly, amusing moments from Andrew Wheeler’s Eliot and Kim Gillingham’s Ligeia, notable caricatures from Bonita Friedericy and John Billingsley and interesting sounds from designer John Zalewski. But the script, first produced in Chicago 10 years ago, needs a tough-minded rewrite.

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* “Ugly’s First World,” Actors’ Gang El Centro Theater, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 20. $12. (323) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.