Well, There Goes the Neighborhood

Imagine a “Saturday Night Live” sketch as written by Ionesco, and you’ll get a rough idea of William Kevin McCauley’s “8 Ways to Meet Your Neighbor” at the Tamarind.

McCauley, who also directs, fuses content and craft in this slight but effectively paranoiac pastiche about the humor and horror of human interaction. It’s an offbeat take in which simple conversations are fraught with destructive potential. Sometimes, the result is merely silly. Often, it is surprisingly profound.

Like speeded-up automatons on the fritz, the cast races through a rapid-fire, pantomimic opening while a straight-faced Announcer (Peter Staloch) spouts the various imperfect ways that human beings communicate, by “deflection and redirection,” with “palaver leading into tangent.”

Which is a pretty good description of the subsequent action, a series of strange and divergent encounters between a couple and their new neighbors. Jane (Andrea Beutner) and Robert (Michael Loomis) are the hosts, Tom (Marc Vann) and Harriet (Ann Randolph) their guests. The names remain the same, but the characters vary wildly from scene to scene. A booming doorbell--not unlike the bell at a boxing match--signals the opening of each segment. Sometimes antagonists, sometimes victims, the couples swap roles instead of spouses in this free-flowing, free-wheeling and expressionistic exchange.

One scene, “Out of the Body and Into the Fire,” segues into a comical sendup of the paranormal. Another, “The Jackals and How They Were Led Down the Sociopath,” casts Jane and Robert as manipulative horrors, with Tom and Harriet as their weak-willed victims. All the performances require considerable comic syncopation, but the rubber-faced Randolph is particularly fine as an outrageous doomsayer who courts catastrophe and spreads misery with missionary zeal.

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* “8 Ways to Meet Your Neighbor,” Tamarind Theatre, 5919 Franklin Ave., Hollywood. Mondays, 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 6. $10. (213) 484-4925. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.