‘C.E.O.’ Aims at the Top With Parody

A young couple’s quiet evening at home is rudely interrupted by a looming figure that trails evil in its wake. Dracula? Frankenstein? The antichrist? Worse. A high-ranking corporate executive! And he’s out to prove that everyone has his or her price.

Part socialist diatribe, part sex farce, Stig Larsson’s “C.E.O.” at the Hudson Avenue Theater, translated from the original Swedish by Joe Morton, features a philosophical dialectic as lame as Vaughn Thomas Munshower’s overwrought staging. John (Rick Lawless), an employee at an unnamed company in an indeterminate field, lives with Anna (Agnete Strand), a nurse on a ward for the terminally ill who has fantasies of helping her patients die.

This cheery couple likes to role-play--Father Confessor and nubile sinner, for example. However, when Steven (Michael Greene), the all-powerful CEO of John’s company, darkens their door, all of John and Anna’s repressed kinkiness erupts to the surface before you can say “running dog lackey of the bourgeoisie.”

Larsson’s play strives to be a shocking parable on the dangers of rampant capitalism but stops somewhere short of coherence. The initially stiff performers eventually warm to their task, particularly after John’s drug-addled brother (David Mucha) and his sexy girlfriend (Ani Sava) arrive on the scene. However, in Larsson’s muddled cosmology, good succumbs to evil without a struggle or even a second thought, weakening the dramatic tension to abject limpness and leaving us wondering what the point, if any, actually is.

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* “C.E.O.,” Hudson Avenue Theater, 1110 N. Hudson, Hollywood. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m. Closes Sunday. $15. (310) 289-2999. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.