‘Summerfolk’: An Accidental Comedy?

If you take a classic Russian play, then strip away its trappings of plot, character and sociopolitical intent, what do you have left?

Roger P. Vontobel’s experimental adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s “Summerfolk” at the Raven Playhouse, a low-concept, high-decibel exercise in festering emotion and despondency.

Vontobel has assembled a superlative company of performers, whom he has not so much directed as set loose. Distilling the sophisticated interactions of Gorky’s lush 1904 period classic to the barest minimum, Vontobel allows his actors to indulge in an emotional orgy with little regard for context or motivation. Like deer in the headlights, aware of their impending doom but frozen into inaction, these modernized Russian archetypes vent, kvetch and generally lament for the better part of an hour.

The result is comically truncated and occasionally hilarious. Yet just how much craft has actually gone into this minimalist romp remains unclear. Did Vontobel intend his adaptation as a comedy from the outset? Or is this farce by serendipity a byproduct of the experimental process?

Whatever Vontobel had in mind, the actors are clearly having a ball with their material. An actress whose cheekbones could shelter the multitudes, Deborah Dir plays a beautiful stoner whose ennui can be directly traced to the hash pipe in her hand. Marcia Moran makes an uproarious drunk, pausing in a scene of passionate lovemaking to barf behind a couch.

And when Wesley Harris interrupts the proceedings for a surprise denouement, everything is put into context at last, the gloom is dispelled, and absurdity reigns.

*

“Summerfolk,” Raven Playhouse, 5233 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Closes April 21. $12. (818) 754-5708. Running time: 1 hour.