‘Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner’ not very filling

Once upon a time -- no, today, actually -- in a kingdom far, far away -- or, perhaps, the house next door -- there lived two sisters who were so hungry that they couldn’t stop eating. No matter how much food the older sister consumed, she felt empty. The younger sister tried sex. Same result.

Where, oh, where would they find something to satisfy them?

Luis Alfaro’s absurdist comedy “Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner” has the dimensions of a fairy tale in its presentation as part of the Mark Taper Forum’s Taper, Too season at the Ivy Substation in Culver City. As in such previous plays as “Bitter Homes and Gardens” and “Straight as a Line,” his characters feel unappreciated, lonely and isolated. They don’t seem to realize that what sets them apart is what makes them beautiful.

Yet while Alfaro imaginatively charts the inner landscape of emptiness, he never entirely succeeds in pulling his audience into the story. Even the crowd of friends and colleagues at Thursday’s opening seemed only sporadically engaged.

In Christopher Acebo’s set, the sisters’ walled-in lives are symbolically suggested by a backdrop that extends the theater’s red-brick walls in a windowless expanse across the back of the playing area.

Older sister Minerva (Diane Rodriguez), or Minnie, as the others call her, is a wife and mother who tries diet after diet but keeps getting bigger. To suggest her girth, Rodriguez is rigged with a shoulder-strap harness that suspends a Hula Hoop around her middle. Minnie’s husband, Al (Winston J. Rocha), is forever glued to ESPN, but from outward appearances, anyway, he’s attentive in the ways that count. Trying to soothe Minnie’s consternation about her weight, he says, “I like you the way you are. If you want to be fat, I’m down with it.”

Younger sister Alice (Rose Portillo) has self-induced amnesia about the past and uses sex to blot out everything else. Her latest blackout drug is Officer Fernandez (Michael Manuel). Whenever they’re together, they’re wrapped around each other like circus contortionists.

Alfaro -- recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant and the Taper’s associate producer of new play development -- prompts laughs with such lines as Al’s explanation that they gave up smoking because “We’ve got all our little second-handers to worry about.” And the performers are engaging, especially Portillo, in the moments when Alice lets her vulnerability show through, and Manuel, whenever he’s playing his strapping, deep-voiced exterior against his character’s goofy, little-boy earnestness.

But the script doesn’t supply enough information. Particularly lacking is an explanation of what damaged these women, what made them respond to life as they do. It’s possible that not seeing the cause is Alfaro’s point. People’s pain isn’t always rational, and even if it is, it isn’t always visible to other people.

But dramatically, that approach doesn’t work. How are we to feel compelled by what’s happening if we aren’t, somehow, pulled inside the women’s plight?

We don’t get much help from director Michael John Garces. He establishes an appropriately heightened, absurdist tone, but he gives the story little forward momentum, letting it move sideways in a flat, boring line.

In part, Alfaro’s characters seem stuck with their unhappiness because they feel they don’t deserve the good in their lives. But that’s just a guess. The only way to cope with this play is to write the missing parts yourself.

*

‘Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner’

Where: Taper, Too at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City.

When: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 and 8 p.m. No performances April 26.

Ends: April 27

Price: $20

Contact: (213) 628-2772 or www.TaperAhmanson.com

Running time: 2 hours