Chandler Lab’s Experiment Succeeds

Among Valley theater operators, there are busier ones than the Chandler Studio’s Michael Holmes (David Cox, for one, seems to have a new show every week under his American Renegade Theatre Company aegis) but none more interesting.

Holmes takes his time, writes and stages many of the plays for his resident Action/Reaction Theatre Company and has a remarkable record of consistency and refinement in a theater space that’s hardly state-of-the-art.

He also tends toward obscure literary and artistic source material (he previously did the extremely rare “Machinal”) and then ekes out their dramatic potential with a tightly knit group of actors. The latest foray, “Blue Heaven,” is pure Holmes at work.

Actually, it is Holmes plus authors Maurice Maeterlinck, Rupert Brooke and Albert Camus. Holmes originally intended to stage Maeterlinck’s one-act “The Intruder,” about a family sensing a ghostly presence in the house, paired with Brooke’s one-act “Lithuania,” about a prodigal son returning home and murdered by his family.

The pairing didn’t seem to work in the early stages (the plays themselves are obscure), but since Holmes and his actors operate in a laboratory rather than a cookie-cutter manner, patience plus trial and error ushered in a fresh play. It combines elements from the one-acts with Camus’ “The Stranger” and even bits from Holmes’ own life.

The result is probably the strangest, most disturbing play yet from the Chandler lab. At its best, it provides a mesmerizing look at how good people go bad, and at its weakest, a hothouse variation on overripe Southern Gothic. “Blue Heaven” observes an east Texas family in bloody implosion during the Depression. The Stranger (Jason Cramer) enters bathed in red light, portentously narrating and singing “My Blue Heaven,” and you know bad things are about to happen.

While Marsha (Nancy Solomons) is having a protracted offstage birth, husband Paul (John Barker), Uncle Oliver (Aaron Fisher) and blind Grandpa (David Bennett) wait on the farm porch and fret. Paul’s 5-year-old, Anna (Erin Record), helps out while Grandpa feels a ghostly presence approaching.

This is what you might call “the Maeterlinck section,” and its sense of dread is dissipated by length.

The main event is “the Brooke section,” when The Stranger arrives at the same farm 25 years later with Anna now a stern, bitter 30-year-old and the farm in total collapse.

Paul is desperate, Anna is stung from years of his (and Uncle Oliver’s) sexual abuse and Marsha is at the end of her wits. The Stranger’s boast of his cash holdings is too tempting for this clan to handle, and when Paul can’t bring himself to kill The Stranger in his sleep, the women devise to do so, with ultra-Gothic results.

Holmes structures the action as if it were halfway between dreaming and waking. The Stranger awakens, at one point, lip-syncing a la Dennis (“The Singing Detective”) Potter to “Red, Red Robin” and later chats to us when he’s drenched in blood.

Anna herself slips between ages 5 and 30 as if she were controlled by someone else’s thoughts.

While “Blue Heaven” is about how civilization’s center point--the family--decays into the animalistic, it is also intriguingly about destiny, memory, irony and the point when life feels out of control.

Such touches as having women first being agents of birth, then agents of death, is only part of the benefit of Holmes’ rewarding decision to combine the original one-acts.

Another benefit is a cast of penetrating actors, led with haunting power by Cramer and Record. Solomons does the difficult feat of playing a woman in deep grief, while Barker suggests a man in total collapse.

Fisher’s Oliver shifts from early jolliness to later evil, but Bennett suffers from his character’s tendency to blab away. Some trimming and this is a lab experiment worth offering to a larger world.

“Blue Heaven,” Chandler Studio, 12443 Chandler Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays 8 p.m. Ends July 24. $10-$15. (818) 908-4094. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.