‘Ugly People,’ ‘Madrigal’ Make Eccentric Pair

Both world premieres, Beth Henley’s “Sisters of the Winter Madrigal” and Frederick Bailey’s “Dirty Ugly People and Their Stupid Meaningless Lives,” presented by Moving Arts and Rolling Pictures at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, get points for eccentricity, but are so lacking in dramatic cohesion they make little impression.

You’d search far before you would find a more unlikely pair of plays on a single bill. Set in medieval times, “Madrigal” concerns two sexy orphaned sisters whose own desirability proves their undoing, while “People” is a dystopian farce set during the “Ferocious Depression of the 2020s.”

The pieces may be vastly separated in time, but they are united in preposterousness. Henley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Crimes of the Heart,” can’t decide whether her tale is a pulp or a tragedy. Her mustache-twirling story concerns Calaih (Cerris Morgan-Moyer), a cowherd girl in love with a shoemaker’s son. A bucolic gal whose best friend is her heifer, Calaih excites the lust of the nefarious High Lord (Tim Woodward), a sadistic hair fetishist who fancies a frolic in her cascading auburn locks. Meanwhile, Calaih’s torrid sister Taretta (Naomi Chan), the village siren, falls ill with a putrescent disease that has her former swains giving her a wide berth.

Bailey, who stages both works on Victoria Profitt’s fetching sets, renders Henley’s play even more bizarre with outlandish directorial choices, such as stage vet Camilla Carr’s over-the-top performance as the High Lord’s messenger--a lunatic and indulgent turn. In his own piece about futuristic down-and-outers living on the margins of a society in collapse, Bailey allows the action to collapse into high-decibel absurdity at an early juncture, never achieving the level of manic hilarity he obviously intends.

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* “Sisters of the Winter Madrigal” and “Dirty Ugly People and their Stupid Meaningless Lives,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., L.A. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Aug. 19. $18. (213) 485-1681. Running time: 2 hours.