No Thrills in This ‘Girly’ Show

Despite its odd, well-hidden location inside Burbank’s George Izay Park, the Burbank Little Theatre is a good space that has been dormant for far too long. Ironically, it’s taken a professional theater company based in Orange County--the Grove Theatre Center--to unlock the Little Theatre’s doors. The Garden Grove theater is debuting with Denise Moses’ solo show, “Girly Americana,” which it first produced this spring in its Gem Theatre.

The Grove would seem to be capable of such an unusual expansion of operations--no previous Orange County-based organization has set up shop in the Valley--since it runs two theaters in Garden Grove and outdoor productions at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton in the summer.

But if you’re the new kid in the busy east end of the Valley, where there are at least a dozen shows any given weekend, you have to make a splash. “Girly Americana” is no splash; it isn’t even a dribble.

Moses’ show is little more than a showcase for her fair talents at changing costumes and putting on various personae--usually biddies, schoolmarms and the like who are actually older than Moses. The shadow of Lily Tomlin looms over “Girly” in the biggest way, and there’s no sign that Moses wants to get out from under it and declare something original.

This is disheartening enough, akin to many of the current and recent performers on “Saturday Night Live” who either do nothing but impersonations or imitate older “SNL” performers. But Moses’ writing is simply not all that funny, evident early on with her schoolteacher character, Miss Donita, who injects absurdly modern spins on fairy tales told to her kindergarten class. “A pathological liar,” she says of Pinocchio.

Perhaps if the bit were delivered with punch and trimmed by at least half, this would be a character who would stick in our heads. As it is, Moses’ women evaporate as soon as she changes garb. Many of them also tend to blur together, not only because of a certain sameness of delivery but because they’re mostly culturally backward types. And those who aren’t--such as Beverly talking on her Web camera, or bitter feminist poet Bernice dressed in black, or Uta Hagen wannabe Madame--are ultimately so dislikable or repellent, we soon wish they would shut up and go away.

It’s difficult to grasp the show’s point, unless the point is to argue that women are a generally loathsome bunch. Rarely does a sense of sympathy or warmth come through in the writing or playing, as if Moses forgot the one essential truth about comedy: It’s a close cousin to tragedy. Tomlin’s own solo work understands this, studiously avoiding the kinds of stereotypes that we’re overdosed with here.

“Girly Americana” gives north-of-Orange County audiences an inaccurate first impression of what the Grove group can do under director Kevin Cochran. A revival of one of its strong productions--”The Adding Machine,” for one--should be the next move.

BE THERE

“Girly Americana,” Burbank Little Theatre, George Izay Park, 1111 W. Olive Ave., Burbank. Fridays-Saturdays at 8 p.m. Ends Nov. 11. $15-$18.50. (818) 238-9998. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.