Going Beyond Blame-It-All-on-Mom

The traps lurk everywhere.

Another revenge exercise in which someone gets back at his mother for not being there, or being there in all the wrong ways?

A play set mostly in Las Vegas, the easiest two-word target on the U.S. map?

Another play about the ravages of AIDS? Can the writer in question bring a fresh perspective to these plague years, at a time when the collective pop unconscious is distracted by computer viruses rather than human ones?

Truly, Luis Alfaro’s “Straight as a Line” goes up against some long odds. But playwriting is alchemy, plus a little luck. A resident artist at the Mark Taper Forum, Alfaro attempts a daring mixture of the intense and the intensely funny. And he succeeds. The sharply realized West Coast premiere of “Straight as a Line” comes courtesy of the Playwrights’ Arena, working out of its shoebox-sized space on West Pico.

Given the play’s relative modesty, no one should approach Alfaro’s two-character, 70-minute black comedy thinking it’ll be something it isn’t. Here’s what it is: A series of odd, often painful scenes between a British expatriate, working as a casino change maker in Vegas, and her dying son. The roles are acted with gusto and grace by Emily Kuroda and James Sie.

In Scene 1, set on a New York subway platform, Paulie (Sie) introduces his mother (Kuroda) to us. “Say allo, Mum,” he says. She does so.

We learn in short order that both mother and son worked as prostitutes in earlier days. Mum has flown in from Vegas to witness her son’s suicide, at the son’s request. If the suicide attempt fails, Paulie promises, he’ll come to live with her in her “desert oasis.”

Scene 2: Vegas; both mother and son very much alive, for the moment.

Paulie, we hear, was the product of “a business transaction” between Mum and a client in her former life. “Straight as a Line” finds two tenuously connected souls trying to learn a new sort of transaction--a meaningful emotional one. To help boost her son’s spirits, Mum loots a stash of AZT at a nearby hospital. “It’s the new thing,” she says. “You just pick it up and run.” Worthy of David Mamet, there’s an exchange regarding the distinction between “looting” and “stealing.”

Director Jon Lawrence Rivera respects the material’s wry off-centeredness. The staging risks overstatement in treating the brief transition scenes--each working variations on the line, “The doctor was here today”--as grotesque vaudeville. The actors pull them off, though.

The roles can be cast any which way, as long as the lines receive the proper British cadences. The Asian American Kuroda and Sie are very fine throughout. Kuroda’s a bit young, but you don’t care, not when you get line readings such as her final, pained offer of “a cup of tea.”

The world, says the son, is “much kinder than the one you’ve led me to believe.” In Alfaro’s earlier one-act, “Bitter Homes and Gardens,” a similarly patterned mother passes on hilariously fatalistic life lessons to her offspring. Some of Alfaro’s instincts are more resonant than others; sometimes these mother figures become punching bags. But only for a while. He’s a very, very interesting writer, and it’s absurd this affecting one-act premiered in Chicago, after the usual passel of L.A. readings and workshops, rather than Alfaro’s hometown.

* “Straight as a Line,” Playwrights’ Arena, 5262 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. (no performance this Thursday). Ends Dec. 18. $15. (323) 960-7756. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Emily Kuroda: Mum

James Sie: Paulie

Written by Luis Alfaro. Directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera. Set by Victoria Profitt. Costumes by Bill Chrisley. Lighting by Robert Fromer. Sound by Bob Blackburn.