ACME’s ‘Ballgame’ Provokes Thoughts Along With Laughter

ACME Comedy Theatre’s “ACME Out to the Ballgame” has nothing to do with baseball and everything to do with games.

Its 16 comic sketches tend to skewer identity, propriety and other socially imposed, behavior-altering notions. Stop second-guessing yourself, the show seems to advocate. Quit letting other people define you. Halt the game-playing and just be yourself.

Or, maybe that’s not what the show is saying at all. But what’s great about sketch comedy is that it homes in on things that everyone is thinking about, and opens them up for contemplation and laughter. Let the ideas take you where they will.

The show’s most subversive sketch manages to tweak political correctness while testing the very notion of sketch comedy. In it, two performers have just launched into a routine when a voice calls out from the audience to complain that the material is slanderous. Soon, other people (all planted in the auditorium) are chiming in with topics that shouldn’t be poked fun at. Taken to its extreme, this sort of thinking would put everything off-limits and become a form of censorship.

That piece is written by Jeff Lewis and Jennifer Carroll, two members of ACME’s current A team, along with Ellen Horn, Ed Marques, Kevin Small, Liam Sullivan and Jonna Tamases, under M.D. Sweeney’s direction.

Two other smart sketches are written by Marques. In one, he plays a Deepak Chopra-like self-help guru who’s trying to admit he’s a fraud, but his acolytes--who are so determined to remake themselves that they’ve become like sheep--aren’t listening. In another, he and Small portray bland, wimpy white guys who try to add some zip to their lives by adopting the dress, language and attitude of Latino homeboys--all in the safety of the living room.

Sullivan stirs the pot with a gender-bending sketch in which he plays a prim woman who’s a new volunteer at a blood drive.

Embarrassed by the personal nature of the questions she must ask potential donors, she tries to reword each topic into euphemisms.

But her oblique references reveal more about her sex life than she intended.

The other pieces don’t always tickle the ribs, despite the wide array of funny faces and fake accents used to put them across. But most of the sketches give the brain a nudge, at least.

“ACME Out to the Ballgame,” ACME Comedy Theatre, 135 N. La Brea Ave., L.A. Saturdays, 8 p.m. Indefinitely. $15. (323) 525-0202. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.