Up-Close Encounters

“Space,” writer-director Tina Landau’s musings on extraterrestrial and earthly contact now at the Mark Taper Forum, hit L.A. at a time when we’re experiencing a peculiar abundance of alien abductions.

Culver City: “A Common Vision,” Neena Beber’s mordant, distinctive comedy that closed earlier this month at the Ivy Substation, began with a woman floating outside her apartment window, an apparent abductee.

Hollywood: Michael R. Farkash’s farce “Stolen Time” continues through Nov. 4 at the Cast Theatre. It’s set at a UFO convention hotel, rife with abductees, lechers and opportunists.

Another part of Hollywood: Dean Haglund, Langly on television’s seven-season hit “The X-Files,” riffs on close encounters of various kinds, human and para-human, in his comedy act “Paranoia Will Destroy Ya!” The Zephyr Theatre run closes Tuesday.

It’s a conspiracy, as if that even needed saying.

When measuring the shelf life of a pop culture trend, time moves like that. The expiration date on a pop trend usually reads something like “Now. It’s over now.”

Both “Space” (at the Taper through Nov. 14) and “A Common Vision” began germinating as early as 1994, but happened to arrive in L.A.--a city whose pet industries have already made piles upon piles from aliens upon aliens--at the same time.

The timing can’t help but make you wonder. Has the moment passed? Was the supergroup Kansas right all along? Only for a moment, then the moment’s gone?

And you wonder: Is theatrical space really the ideal place for space exploration?

With a sliver of imagination and a few million in computer-generated imagery, the movies and TV can fly us to the moon and let us play among the stars. Easy. We’ve flown there hundreds of times.

In interviews, Landau has stressed that “Space,” which is very familiar in terms of story, isn’t about alien abduction. It concerns a neuropsychiatrist suddenly beleaguered by people who believe themselves to be alien abductees. The protagonist’s budding friendship with an astronomer, much like the one played by Jodie Foster in the film “Contact,” brings two isolated characters together.

The earnest yet flashy “Space” generally avoids the temptations of literal-minded spectacle, though some of its effects--strobe-like flashes, transitional sound cues that sound like enormous metal drawers slamming shut--are more cinematic than theatrical. At the Taper, you can practically see the little gray bubbles of disgruntlement emitting from the ears of Industry People. “This ‘Space’ has some nerve, showing up late like this. My friend over at Paramount passed on a million of these.”

One of the freshest plays trading on our pop notions about abduction remains Constance Congdon’s play “Tales of the Lost Formicans,” first spotted at the 1989 Humana new play festival in Louisville, Ky. Congdon may traffic in aliens and depict an abduction, but she’s mostly compelled by everyday concerns, by middle-class lives unraveling, with or without alien activity.

In “Formicans,” a mother and her insolent teenage son leave New York for the mother’s folks’ house in a Denver suburb. Father suffers from Alzheimer’s; the neighbor is a conspiracy nut and UFO enthusiast. The Formicans are us, the workaday, often perplexed members of a lost suburban tribe looking for solace, meaning, peace.

The play is structured as a lecture demonstration of the tribe’s customs and habits; the lecture is delivered by aliens observing our behavior. It’s clever, and it’s more.

In the forward to a collection of Congdon’s plays, Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) lauds the playwright for her part in “a discovery [that] was waiting to be made, namely that the theater’s peculiarities made it a particularly resonant space for the staging of the kind of postmodern, collective nervous breakdown American society has been having.”

How alien can alien life be, given the lives most of us lead? That’s the central, aching joke at the heart of Congdon’s play. With this play, as with Beber’s “Common Vision,” you don’t get the sense that their respective stories belong in another milieu. For all Landau’s skill, “Space” seems at odds with its chosen medium.

Which isn’t to say the stage should stick to kitchen-sink realism. Too often we go to the theater, see a little something in a proudly realistic, fundamentally unimaginative mode, and we’d have been better off paying to stare at a sink at home for a couple of hours.

The best thing about “Space” is its willingness to mix up its storytelling techniques. It floods the Taper stage with an extraordinarily complex lighting design, imparting shadows, dreamlike landscapes, projections of other galaxies. Landau’s a fine stage imagist. As playwright, however, she lets her director--herself--down.

The stage can go anywhere it wants to, just as a movie can. It can layer realities upon realities, shape-shift, ask big, sticky, searching questions--Are we alone? Is anybody there? Hello? Is this thing on?--on any kind of budget.

“Are there no spirits moving in the air, ruling the region between earth and sky?” That’s a question asked by Faust, the devil-dealing hero of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s seam-bursting, mind-blowing masterwork, now nearly two centuries old. A response of sorts comes earlier in Goethe’s play, which may not contain a single reference to alien abduction, but has just about everything else a play can have.

In the prelude to “Faust, Part One,” a stage director talks with his cohorts about the audience’s appetite for a really big show.

“Use starlight--we have stars galore,” the character exhorts. Goethe didn’t have Spielberg and Chris Carter to worry about, of course. If he did, he might’ve added: “Use them, but wisely. Inventively. Theatrically. Computer-generated imagery just isn’t in our budget.” *

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* “Space,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 628-2772. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 14. $29-$42.

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* “Stolen Time,” Cast-at-the-Circle Theatre, 800 N. El Centro Ave., (323) 462-0265. Wednesday-Thursday, 8 p.m. Ends Nov. 4. $13.50-$15.

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* “Paranoia Will Destroy Ya,” Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., (310) 852-9111. This Tuesday only, 8 p.m. $8.