‘Jacques’ Strives for Comedy

A few begats:

The wit and moral despair of Aristophanes begat the slippery slaves and credulous masters of Plautus. Shakespeare honored both writers and, with King Lear and his Fool, refined the master-slave dynamic into a new kind of stage poetry.

That poetry was exploded and reassembled by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, characters inspired by cheap chronicles of knight errantry. Then came Diderot’s glorious, narrative-fracturing “Jacques the Fatalist and His Master,” a novel that Milan Kundera (among others) puts right up there with Cervantes’ “Quixote.”

In other words, Kundera’s stage adaptation of “Jacques and His Master,” now in a loud, unevenly acted Sacred Fools Theater production, lugs at least two tons of carry-on literary baggage. Kundera carries it easily. He wrote a shrewd homage to Diderot’s novel, following Jacques and the man employing him this way and that, into various inns and various beds, graced by various arms of various women.

Simon Callow’s English-language translation, the one used here, made its L.A. premiere in 1987, in a production staged by Callow. Late in the play, we hear the phrase “gentle wisdom”--and in director John Sylvain’s game but shrill Sacred Fools rendition, the reference makes no sense. There’s no gentle anything here, nothing sly or ironic or offhand.

Two performers stand out, nevertheless. Phil LaMarr, of the Groundlings troupe and “Mad TV,” brings an air of easy comic authority to each new lesson learned, or taught. And Amy Bryson matches him nicely. When these two share a scene, suddenly Kundera’s ode to masters and slaves throughout literary history snaps into focus.

* “Jacques and His Master,” Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive (at Melrose), Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends March 11. $10. (310) 281-8337. Running time: 2 hours.