Gurney times 4: a small sum

If you are a dedicated fan of playwright A.R. Gurney, two Gurney productions that just opened locally may hold considerable interest for you. If not, you may find the going a bit thankless.

An evening of early Gurney one-acts from the 1960s, “Suburban Blight,” at McCadden Place Theatre, is graced with a sprightly cast and taut direction by Craig Carlisle. “Sylvia,” one of the playwright’s later works, now being presented by the Lyric Hyperion Company at the Company of Angels venue in Silver Lake, is more unwieldy in execution. Whatever the level of finesse, the thematic substance in both productions is meager indeed.

The three playlets in “Blight” are seminal exercises from a young playwright who seems anxious to dip his toes in the 1960s mainstream of strained naughtiness. “Sylvia” seems the weary effort of a tired artist resorting to a bottomless bag of tricks. Early and late, the Gurney works in these productions are mere curiosities -- bookends to an otherwise distinguished career that includes more substantial offerings like “The Dining Room” and “The Middle Ages,” droll examinations of sexual repression and cultural elitism among embattled American WASPs.

Carlisle taps into that rich vein of repression and comical dysfunction, if only superficially, in “Blight.” The evening’s opener, “The Rape of Bunny Stuntz,” is spearheaded by the commanding Amy Scribner as a suburban matron whose hidebound perceptions are rattled by the appearance of a mysterious stranger. Second on the bill, “The Golden Fleece,” is a modernized spin on the Medea legend filtered through the perspective of a warring married couple (Michael Leydon Campbell and Elizabeth Cantu). Like “Stuntz,” the action in “Fleece” is set in a community meeting, a device that allows the actors to address the audience and expound at length about offstage occurrences. In contrast to Cantu’s shallowly perky performance, Campbell shines in his thoroughly naturalistic turn as a beleaguered family man chafing at the constraints of domesticity.

The evening’ creaky closer, “The Problem,” features Bjorn Johnson and Hillary Straney as a married couple of the most preposterously restrained stripe. She announces she’s pregnant with a black man’s child; he reacts with unruffled suavity. Gurney’s clumsy sendup of race issues, and his obvious efforts to shock, now seem fatally quaint.

When it comes to insubstantial, few plays rival the unmitigated fluff of Gurney’s “Sylvia,” a tale about a man’s obsessive relationship with his talking dog. Perennially popular and often produced, “Sylvia” is Gurney’s late-life bow to the high concept. Candice Rose plays Sylvia, the scruffy pooch who so charms her master Greg (Bob Bancroft) that she almost destroys his marriage.

Eliciting only the most cursory performances from his cast, director Patrick Brien takes a broad and unchallenging approach to his material, letting the too-few moments of gentle wit congeal into the sadly sophomoric.

*

‘Suburban Blight’

Where: McCadden Place Theatre, 1157 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood

When: Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 16

Price: $15

Info: (323) 655-8587

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

*

‘Sylvia’

Where: Company of Angels, 2106 Hyperion Ave., Silver Lake

When: Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 15

Price: $15

Info: (323) 841-2270

Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes