To be young, Jewish and black

Irreverent hilarity spices up “Fried Chicken and Latkas,” now playing Wednesdays at the Canon Theater in Beverly Hills. Rain Pryor’s account of growing up black, Jewish and Richard Pryor’s daughter is an effective showcase for a ripe talent.

Pryor, accompanied by ace musical director Gail Johnson, starts in swinging, her opening number putting thematic new lyrics to Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret”: “What’s the big deal if I’m black and a Jew? / In temple, I sing the blues. / Life is fried chicken and latkas, too: / I’ll make Shabbat for you!” This insouciance just barely prepares her audience for the ribald, bumptious scenario that ensues.

Pryor’s crazy-quilt chronological trajectory illuminates her personal and professional saga with instant characterizations, musical numbers and freewheeling aphorisms that range from corny to convulsive under Tracy Silver’s direction, augmented by Clinton Derricks-Carroll. Pryor’s Modigliani-moppet expressions, kinetic ease, powerful singing voice and rich comic ingenuity are invaluable assets. Conversing with the audience as her paternal grandmother (which is worth the whole enterprise), or sporting an Afro the size of Belize (designed by John Stapleton), Pryor is wickedly funny and sharply observant, as in her uproarious send-ups of her mother and maternal grandmother.

However, when she deals with harsher issues, such as bigotry she has encountered or surviving her father’s travails, Pryor’s form inhibits her content -- as in her Dad-motivated rendition of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach’s “God Give Me Strength” at midpoint, more suited for the evening’s climax, or her hastily achieved, underdeveloped uplifting resolution.

Pryor’s fertile material and cathartic intent fully warrant full-length expansion beyond this cabaret-style format. Given the clamor at the reviewed performance, she certainly has the audience to justify such architectural additions.

-- David C. Nichols

“Fried Chicken and Latkas,” Canon Theatre, 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept. 24. Mature audiences. $20. (310) 859-2830, (213) 365-3500. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

*

‘Plague Year’ is a tad moribund

Daniel Defoe’s life was nothing if not eventful. Born in 1660, Defoe was variously a merchant, a writer (“Robinson Crusoe,” “Moll Flanders”), bankrupt and a spy whose irreligious satires earned him stints in prison and the pillory.

Defoe’s famous mordancy is in short supply in his “Journal of the Plague Year,” a dry recounting of the great London plague of 1665 as seen through the eyes of Defoe’s narrator, a saddler trapped in London for the duration. In his thoughtful and visually stunning interpretation at the Gascon Theatre Center, Stephen Legawiec throws in some plot twists and poetic license but otherwise is overly reverential with his source material.

The founder and artistic director of the Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble, Legawiec is noted for his galvanic productions derived from various world myths, such as last season’s critically acclaimed “Red Thread,” a martial arts-influenced romp based on an ancient Chinese folk tale. “Plague,” which, sadly, will be the last Ziggurat production at the Gascon before the theater undergoes a major redevelopment, is essentially a one-man show, written by Legawiec and featuring him as the nameless saddler-narrator.

The set and costumes, designed by Legawiec, are characteristically impeccable, as is Leif Gantvoort’s superlative lighting design.

Director Dana Wieluns keeps the action relentlessly meditative and austere. In his recapitulation of Defoe’s recapitulation, Legawiec maintains the measured and slightly sanctimonious tone of Defoe’s protagonist, whose recital of mortality rates and mortuary procedures occasionally borders on the droning. It is when Legawiec portrays various subsidiary characters -- the quacks and charlatans who proliferated during the epidemic -- that a redemptive liveliness infuses the proceedings, and we glimpse the glinting eye behind the death mask.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“Journal of the Plague Year,” Gascon Center Theatre, 8737 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 7. $15. (310) 842-5737. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

*

‘Oedipus’ morphs into modern times

Symbolist tactics and City of Angels targets mutate throughout “OedipusText: Los Angeles” in Santa Monica. This adroit City Garage deconstruction imbues Sophocles’ ageless saga of the incestuous king of Thebes with modern elements ranging from self-help to trip-hop.

It transpires, as usual with this company, in a self-contained abstract ethos. Author-designer Charles A. Duncombe draws Jocasta’s lines from Helene Cixous’ opera “The Name of Oedipus: Song of the Forbidden Body,” but his esoteric text is otherwise original and impressive.

Fredereque Michel’s staging of this melange of neoclassical restraint, shock-radio sass and Freudian polemic attains droll kinetic cohesion, moving a unified ensemble around Duncombe’s screen-dominated minimalist set with invisible ease. Duncombe’s concentrated lighting, Paul M. Rubenstein’s wry videography and Teckla de Bistrovlnovska’s color-coded costumes are invaluable in locating the reference points.

Simon Burzynksi’s intense hero is a leather-jacketed Tom Cruise Jr., while Maureen Byrnes’ Jocasta is a riveting column of white who recalls the late Irene Worth. Rubenstein’s sidesplitting DJ is scandalously effective, and David E. Frank is brilliant, whether playing a Nehru-dressed, rocker-voiced Tiresias or a shrieking Dr. Laura-esque harpy.

Three red-capped gangbangers (Eric Jung, Jason Piazza and Thomas Ramirez) share chorus duties, alternating as isolated urbanites whose interactions with Tina Fallon’s brittle chat-room fraud and Jennifer Piehl’s unfettered online exhibitionist punctuate Oedipus’ downward spiral.

However, their visceral maneuvers just miss pathos: The compressed ideology is intellectually arresting but emotionally bloodless. Even so, the group aesthetic is imposing, analogous to (though opposite from) Sons of Beckett’s current sendup “Oedipus the King,” which recommends “OedipusText” as a Greek reconsideration to be reckoned with.

-- D.C.N.

“OedipusText: Los Angeles,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St. (alley), Santa Monica. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 21. Mature audiences. $10-$20; Sundays, pay what you can. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

*

‘Jews & Jesus’ is less than divine

Oren Safdie’s musical comedy “Jews & Jesus” at the Malibu Stage is a cheerful but exasperating mess about the dating and amatory practices of its various, mostly Jewish heroes and heroines. The charming, klezmer-influenced music by Ronnie Cohen, who also wrote the less-than-enthralling lyrics, is glittering spackle that fails to hide the cracks in a flimsy edifice.

Director Craig Carlisle presides over the West Coast premiere of this bagatelle, which ran in New York in 1999 to inexplicably favorable reviews. Carlisle also helmed Safdie’s “Private Jokes, Public Places” at the Malibu Stage. A philosophically provocative drama about a young female architecture student who is presenting her thesis project before an elitist academic jury, “Jokes” recently played in New York and is now slated for an extended off-Broadway run.

Anyone who saw that sophisticated play in its Los Angeles debut may be taken aback by this sophomoric effort, which can never keep tongue in cheek without drooling. The play’s characters include Steve (Adam Fleck), a nonreligious Jew who is dating a beautiful Catholic girl (Gretel Roenfeldt). Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, Debra (Iris Bahr), a half-Jewish, half-Gentile girl from New York, gets involved with a fanatical yeshiva student (Griffin Shaw). Rounding out the mix are Micki Schloss and Sheilah A. Grenham as an Israeli rabbi and his disaffected wife.

Rambling chatter about sex, God and Jewishness is periodically punctuated by musical numbers, performed with varying degrees of expertise by the actors, who range from the crisply professional to the rhythm-challenged. Terrific accompaniment by the Rabbinical School Dropouts shores things up for a time, but you can watch this play for two solid hours and still have no earthly idea of its central premise.

-- F.K.F.

“Jews & Jesus,” Malibu Stage, 29243 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5 p.m. Ends Sept. 14. $20. (310) 589-1998. Running time: 2 hours.

*

An imaginative genre-bender

When a popular British writer of cold, intellectual detective yarns suddenly produces a love story teeming with illicit passions and emotional depth, it’s bound to raise a few eyebrows -- especially on the forehead of his long-neglected wife. Was her husband’s late-career genre switch born out of some adulterous affair, or is it simply “An Act of the Imagination”?

The mystery framed by the title of Bernard Slade’s entertaining thriller is only the first stop along a trail of increasingly sinister conundrums. No stranger to adultery, Slade (“Same Time, Next Year”) marries one of his signature themes to the conventions of the classic whodunit, with some clever spins that fans of the genre will appreciate.

Slade’s shy, tweedy protagonist, Arthur Putnam (Michael Forest), is an unlikely Lothario -- by his own admission, people’s eyes glaze over when he talks to them. His wife, Julia (Kathrine Bates), seems to share his self-assessment and readily accepts his denial when a blackmailing waif (Fleur Phillips) claims to have had a tryst with Arthur that suspiciously mirrors events in his as-yet-unpublished book.

However, unexpected sides to Arthur emerge that call his innocence into question after his accuser apparently meets with foul play. Clues, red herrings and motives abound, as well as an array of suspects -- topped by Arthur’s ne’er-do-well son (Gregory G. Giles) and a perky assistant editor (Nanette Hennig) whose loyalty to Arthur seems too good to be true. Even Julia’s mantle of noble self-sacrifice starts to wear thin.

Brian David Pope’s staging puts his solid Theatre 40 cast to fine use, keeping the action lively and focused through increasingly dense plot twists. The story’s intricacy comes at a price, however; making all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place often strains the credibility of what people will and won’t reveal about themselves and under what circumstances.

Only in the final scene does Slade unveil the authentic human lesson he’s been getting at all along. At bottom, this play is really a confession about how writers too easily become so inwardly absorbed in their craft that they lose touch with the things that really matter -- a poignant sentiment, but I was too busy writing my review to pay much attention to it.

-- Philip Brandes

“An Act of the Imagination,” Theatre 40, Beverly Hills High School Reuben Cordova Theatre, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 7. $18-20. (310) 364-0535. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.