Stage Light

It used to be that L.A.’s small theaters seemed a floating Mecca for self-confessionals, in which actors and performers would spill their guts in solo shows about their ostensibly interesting lives.

If you were lucky, the actor would make the evening interesting even if the life in question wasn’t. If you were unlucky, it was just one more stake in the heart of the Me Generation.

This has all subsided a bit in the last few years, although the city’s permanent overflow of underemployed actors and theater operators eager to fill their spaces continues to make the solo show an L.A. theater staple.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of Jeff Korn’s show “Hell-A-Vision” at Two Roads Theatre is how it sends us back to the not-so-pleasant boom period of solo confessionals and makes us not miss it one iota.

At least with many solo pieces--Paul Linke’s frequently moving shows, for example--the artist is in a self-deprecating mode, willing to admit that he is no better than the rest of us. Korn’s overextended memoir of a disastrous relationship that lasted from 1995 to 1999 takes the opposite tack. Yes, he begins by encouraging us to yell out in unison, “Jeff Korn is a schmuck!” But he then proceeds to lay out an obviously exaggerated but heartfelt and apparently true account in which everyone else is a schmuck and Korn is some kind of unwitting victim.

Korn is a working comedian, and his goal here is to stretch the kind of story that might fill five or 10 minutes in a stand-up act to an hour, filled out with goofy physical action and strobe lights. While his struggles with snooty girlfriend Sarah (whom he refers to as “The Princess”) are frustrating and encompass everything from a cross-country voyage to a climactic battle on a TV game show, they are not the stuff of a longer treatment.

The huge chunk of time through which we’re expected to hang in there with Korn lets us muse over such details as why he stayed so long with so clearly an unloving, spiteful young woman. (He thinks about it for a moment, too, and his only excuse is that she was young.) As writer and performer, he remains so full of rage over the time and energy he wasted with Sarah that there’s no room left for real reflection and comic humility--qualities that would make “Hell-A-Vision” a fun and inviting experience. As it stands, this is little more than a case of another angry guy expecting us to pay attention.

It would also help if Korn were consistently funny, if only to leaven his egocentric animus. This is also the problem with the warm-up acts: Sam Dunnavent’s substandard impersonations of a soon-to-be unemployed Bill Clinton and William Shatner, and Dan Rosenberg’s thoroughly stalled stand-up routine, which covers such burning topics as Thomas Guides and pets passing gas.

BE THERE

“Hell-A-Vision,” Two Roads Theatre, 4348 Tujunga Ave., Studio City. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends Jan. 27. $10. (818) 754-2500. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.