Crowd Herds Around Stage at ‘American Buffalo’

MAMET IN THE HOUSE: Sparing neither expletives nor metaphors, “American Buffalo” ends its run in the intimate Theater 150 in Ojai this weekend.

Plenty of edgy theatrics are promised in David Mamet’s 1975 play about bungling thieves eyeing a coin collection in a Chicago junk shop. And, everything will be up-close and personal in the 50-seat house.

The theater’s dimensions are humble, but the participants come with impressive resumes. Actor Scott Allan Campbell, one of the many Ojai residents with Hollywood ties, has been seen on TV’s “The X-Files” and “NYPD Blue.”

Actor-director James Lashley, another L.A.-to-Ojai emigre, has television credits that include “The Waltons” and “Columbo.” Locally, he directed the venturesome Brecht play “Mr. Puntila and his Man Matti,” linked with the 1999 Ojai Music Festival.

In “American Buffalo,” audiences get their money’s worth of Mamet-esque venom, with no seat farther than 12 feet from the stage. Sunday’s final performance is sold out, but seats are available on Friday and Saturday.

Details: “American Buffalo” through Sunday at Theater 150, 918 E. Ojai Ave., 646-4200. Show times: Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. Fri.-Sat., $15, Sun., sold out. Reservations suggested.

SUMMER SEND-OFF: A twofold agenda defines Saturday’s concert by the Los Robles Master Chorale. They are capping off the 2000-01 concert season and also previewing music they will perform on a European summer tour to Italy and Croatia. Included on the program is a new piece by local composer Wilbur Skeels, “Missa Brevis Terras Novae,” commissioned by the chorale.

Details: Los Robles Master Chorale, “Arrivederci!” 8 p.m. Saturday at Cal Lutheran’s Samuelson Chapel, 60 W. Olsen Road, Thousand Oaks. Tickets are $18 for adults and $14 for seniors; 497-0386.

EXTREMISM BY THE SEA: The seventh edition of the Vans Warped Tour stops at Ventura’s Seaside Park next Thursday. The tour was conceived as “a summer camp on wheels, where extreme music, athletes and lifestyles could commingle and thrive.”

In past summers, the road shows included the likes of Green Day, Eminem, Weezer, Ice-T, Bad Religion, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Limp Bizkit and Social Distortion. This year’s lineup includes 311, Rancid, Pennywise, Rollins Band and the Ataris.

Visitors to the Seaside compound next week can also expect to witness a new kind of traveling circus, including “Incredibly Strange Wrestling” and extreme sports demonstrations by virtuoso skaters including Mike Frazier and Jess Fritsch and BMX bike gymnast Rick Thorne. And the Reverse Day Care? That is where kids deposit parents who would rather lounge in a non-music zone than brave the sonic onslaught.

Parents shouldn’t worry: It’s a corporate-friendly extravaganza, with sponsorship from Target, Vans, Launch.com and PlayStation2. Expect none of the Grateful Dead’s bohemian village that descended on this same space so many years ago.

Details: Vans Warped Tour ‘01, Thursday at Ventura Seaside Park Tickets are $19.99., online at https://www.warpedtour.com.

INTRIGUING INTERACTION: There is a strange, friendly world of interactive shapes to be found in the Upstairs Gallery of Natalie’s Fine Threads, courtesy of Julia Pinkham’s current exhibition, “The Vernacular of Lines.”

In her gently engaging paintings, Pinkham likes to create mazes of biomorphic shapes, molded into abstract compositions that could easily trigger echoes of Gorky or Miro. There is a lighter side winking at the viewer, as well, with goopy forms that seem to reflect the late 1950s culture of leisure that yielded cell-shaped furniture.

In the series called “Language Lessons,” successive rows of hieroglyphic-like images suggest an un-deciphered alphabet. These pieces refer to the encoded, yet essentially enigmatic meaning of visual language and the DNA of language itself. In the exuberant relief sculptures of “Music Series,” it’s as if she has exploded the language of lines and shapes in her paintings into three dimensions, layering colorful elements that live in real space.

“Global Warning” puns off a loaded term and alerts our sense of doom, and we naturally read the mysterious shapes on a landscape as post-Apocalyptic plant life. But just as kitsch blends with abstract Expressionism in many of her paintings, some sort of ironic formality sneaks into the mix here. Like de Chirico’s late paintings, the dark corners and shadows of dream states suddenly turn a corner into breezy lightness.

Details: “The Vernacular of Lines,” through July 14 at the Upstairs Gallery at Natalie’s Fine Threads, 596 E. Main St. in Ventura. Gallery hours: 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Tue.-Sat., noon-4 p.m., Sun.; 643-8854.