A laid-back approach to the human comedy

Light and snappy as an ocean breeze rippling a sail, Adam Bock’s “Swimming in the Shallows” uses terse sketch-comedy shorthand to capture a slice of life among three couples in Twig, R.I.

There’s nothing earthshaking about these pairings -- one straight, one lesbian and one, strictly speaking, inter-species -- or about Bock’s insights into them. But an unfussy, matter-of-fact tone is a big part of the show’s appeal.

“There are Buddhist monks with only eight things,” observes prim nurse Barb (Danielle Hoover) to her colleague Carla Carla (Shannon Sweetmon), a butch lesbian with commitment issues.

Or, rather, commitment ceremony issues. She and her lover, plain-talking Donna (Jennifer Fitzgerald), spend most of the play fretting about their upcoming wedding. Meanwhile, Barb strips her life of distractions, including her husband (Josh Levy), and gay Nick (Robbie Cain) tries to forgo serial dating for true love.

Romance comes along in the form of a dashing mako shark (Guy Woodson). No one bats an eye at this unlikely coupling, least of all Nick or the shark, who apparently can talk, dance, even sell Avon door to door.

This man/shark premise makes a strange stretch indeed, but somehow it gracefully crystallizes the show’s pleasingly offhanded attitude of tolerance, not only for all orientations but also for all manner of human foibles.

Director Anthony Meindl’s cast is tight and well tuned. But the show’s tasty moral center is Hoover’s Barb, who sheds bourgeois anxieties along with her starchy nurse’s uniform yet maintains an irresistibly sunny, big-hearted disposition -- not unlike the show itself.

-- Rob Kendt

“Swimming in the Shallows,” Meta- Theatre Company at the 3rd Street Theatre, 8140 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends May 30. $20. (323) 993-7113. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

*

Let’s analyze the analysts

“I couldn’t help deconstructing him,” says one therapist to another in “The Family Room,” Aron Eli Coleite’s searching new play about the psychiatric profession and its discontents.

The therapist is talking about a boyfriend she dumped, but she could be speaking for all five shrinks depicted in Coleite’s round-robin orgy of analysis. None of these messed-up docs can resist applying their training to their own nearest and dearest, though this learned perspective makes them scarcely more able, and in some ways far less equipped, to handle the ups and downs of human relations.

Rebellious teen David (Jonny Vincent) thinks he sees through all this flimflam: His father (Gary Carter) and mother (D.J. Harner) are therapists who are in therapy themselves -- as are both of their therapists (Mary Cobb and Hubert Hodgin).

To David, this Mobius strip of navel-gazing is sheer hypocrisy, even if he must admit some progress with the no-nonsense therapist (Jennifer Dithridge) to whom he’s sent.

And David isn’t above conducting an ill-advised experiment on an introverted Goth classmate (Annie Quinn). A romance unexpectedly blooms, though it can’t entirely escape analytic damage.

Under director Justin A. Yoffe, the performances have an edgy naturalism, though he lingers a bit too thoughtfully over the theatrical device of doctors and patients changing seats.

Still, the play’s authentic outrage and raw irony can’t be stifled. Like any child raised on the cold comfort of dogma, David must fight bitterly for unmediated communication and unconditional love. That’s a struggle all too many of us shrink from.

-- R.K.

“The Family Room,” the Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends May 8. $18. (866) 633-6246. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

*

Journal of a plague year

In the late 1990s, theater companies became infatuated with the Naomi Wallace play “One Flea Spare,” in which class-warped impulses rise to the surface when social constraints are taken away. The story resonated in a city that had been shaken in that decade by rioting and earthquakes.

The play retains much of its power in a staging by Sight Unseen Theatre Group, though this youthful company lacks the range and maturity to pull it off with complete success.

The action unfolds in a plague year -- 1665, in London -- its bleakness captured in a large painting of prone bodies and funeral processions (designed by Ashley Rice and rendered with the assistance of TJ Moore and Margo Grajeda). Dominating the back wall of the performing space, it’s a grimly apropos backdrop to the upper-class home of a couple (Michael Laurino and Susan Matus) who are nearing the end of quarantine when a destitute seaman (Clark Freeman) and mysterious 12-year-old (Mariah Sussman) invade, thinking the house has been abandoned. A supercilious watchman (Frank Smith) immediately consigns the quartet to 28 days of isolation.

Left to their own devices, the characters give in to curiosity and lust. Dominance shifts; allegiances vary. Freeman and Matus -- the latter looking like a Vermeer painting come to life -- deliver luminous portrayals of lonely souls who connect across class lines. Laurino and Sussman are hampered, however, by looking, respectively, too young and too old to convincingly inhabit their characters.

Under Sam Roberts’ direction, the show is moodily evocative, though sensations have an unfortunate tendency to fade during awkward scene changes.

-- Daryl H. Miller

“One Flea Spare,” Sight Unseen Theatre Group at the Other Space, Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th St., Santa Monica. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends May 8. $15. (310) 393-1995. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

*

Bradbury recycles a novel idea

Ray Bradbury’s dramatization of his 2003 fantasy-mystery novel, “Let’s All Kill Constance,” at the Court Theatre appears to be intended primarily for his fans who have already enjoyed the book and, perhaps, for those who have also read two previous Bradbury novels with the same screenwriter narrator.

As someone who read “Constance” only after seeing the play, I found the play more mystifying than mysterious.

Set in 1960, the story opens in L.A.’s Venice during “a dark and stormy night” (Bradbury apparently believes that using Snoopy’s favorite phrase as his opening line is a great joke). Constance Rattigan, a veteran Hollywood star, bangs on the door of the narrator in a panic. He immediately drops everything in order to help her figure out who has left her with two books that are ominous reminders of her mortality.

His attempts begin with climbing to a man’s lair on Mt. Lowe. He then visits a fortuneteller on Bunker Hill, Constance’s priestly brother at St. Vibiana’s, an ancient denizen of an abandoned projection booth at Grauman’s Chinese, a Hollywood drag queen. The intrepid hero and three unlikely sidekicks resort to using storm drains to commute all over town. Not surprisingly, a small stage isn’t ideal for evoking the story’s vivid locations.

The bond between the narrator and Constance is never explained. And director Alan Neal Hubbs made it even less comprehensible by casting fresh-faced James Snyder, who graduated from college only last May, as the narrator -- who has supposedly known Constance (Gay Storm) for decades. Why the narrator would go to such lengths to help her is the story’s primary unintentional mystery.

Annoyingly eccentric supporting characters come and go. The atmosphere of self-conscious whimsy becomes so thick that audience members may find themselves hoping that the title comes true so that the play will end sooner.

-- Don Shirley

“Let’s All Kill Constance,” Court Theatre, 722 N. La Cienega Blvd., L.A. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends May 22. $25. (800) 595-4849. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.