A sweet ‘Egos’ trip provides wry laughs

Youth is served -- and nicely too -- in “An Evening With the Egos” at the Little Victory Theatre.

Early on, Joseph De Rosa’s world premiere comedy about two commitment-shy people and their tumultuous office romance bogs down in its own high concept. The gimmick here is that the young lovers’ inner thoughts are articulated by their own “egos” -- cheeky personae who root the lovers on from the sidelines and keep the audience abreast of the true meaning underneath their awkward interchanges.

The material is undeniably slight. However, director Maria Gobetti and her energetic cast puff this paper airplane to cruising altitude and keep it there. Adrianne Avey plays Carol, a self-sufficient customer rep whose co-worker William (Jeremy Kent Jackson) adores her from afar -- or at least from another cubicle.

Dominic Catrambone and his real-life wife, Juliette Miller, are Carol’s and William’s respective egos -- color commentators in the game of love. These two -- make that four -- are perfect for one another, but childhood traumas, seen in flashback, cause their fledgling relationship to falter.

The play is about as deep as a sitcom, so much so that the emotionally charged flashbacks, which provide obligatory but strained explanations of why Carol and William are so obdurately coy, constitute jarring departures in tone. But the romantic dynamic between the lovers -- both sets -- is so sparkling and believable that we forgive the sometimes trumped up motivations.

Despite its shortcomings, the play is consistently wry and entertaining.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“An Evening With the Egos,” Little Victory Theatre, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 22. $20-$22. (818) 841-5422. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

*

A prescription for wackiness

Director Matthew Wilder is some kind of genius, the kind who grabs you by the lapels and demands to be reckoned with, every moment of every scene.

Wilder hovers self-consciously between epiphany and fiasco, inspiration and indulgence. Call it sheer theatrical brilliance or mere pretentious twaddle, but you always know you’re seeing something; indifference is not an option.

With writer Gil Kofman’s gleefully offensive new medical lampoon, “Pharmacopeia: The Most Lamentable Tragedy of William Payne, M.D.,” Wilder has less a play than a playground for outsized staging conceits: Ironic musical numbers straight out of Dennis Potter’s worst hospital nightmares; found footage and slides projected across translucent scrims (set design by Efren Delgadillo Jr., video design by Jamie Mcelhinney); expressionistic lighting design by Brian J. Lilienthal; sound design, by Ezra Walker and David Baker, that samples everything from composer Bernard Herrmann to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; an aggressive, unsubtle performance style.

Most of his game cast is up to the challenge, particularly Joseph Hulser as Dr. William Payne, the show’s loopy, lecherous antihero, who leads a quixotic crusade against cancer from storefront digs in Vegas.

Jessica Ires Morris provides bracing reality checks in two roles.

And as an entirely superfluous but indispensably hilarious mullet-headed yahoo, Declan Galvin is a find. “Pharmacopeia” achieves something close to dialectical clarity; tellingly, Wilder shows refreshing directorial restraint here.

-- Rob Kendt

“Pharmacopeia: The Most Lamentable Tragedy of William Payne, M.D.” Shock & Awe Productions at the Evidence Room, 2200 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 22. $20. (310) 869-0977. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

*

Grown-up Grimm pulls no punches

A satanic arrangement maims an innocent girl, who nonetheless marries royalty. Three rural roommates change their domestic routine only to become lunch. Two brothers mimicking their beef-butcher dad push roughhousing into tragedy. These tabloid scenarios are from “Tres Grimm! (Grimm III)” at the MET Theatre. George Larkin’s third slate of adult takes on tales by folklore’s cautionary brothers is a vivacious volume earmarked by wry designs and spry playing, some distractions notwithstanding.

A modern storyteller (Lindsay Frame) and her stepdaughter (Angela DiMarco) propel Larkin’s prologue, “The Death of the Little Hen.” This ensemble schoolyard goof is vicious and hysterical. So is Ruth Silveira’s saga of “The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage,” with Tyler Tanner’s rodent, Rachel Levy’s avian and Eric Riviera’s Hormel candidate all hilarious.

Tanner and Jeff Folschinsky’s “The Singing Bone” is a bebop riff featuring director Noah Blake, whose vocals ignite his colleagues. Erik Evans’ “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” (the butcher’s boys) sees Alexis Wesley, Jonathan Winn, Geoffrey Hillback and Skip Moore balancing satire and horror, under set designer Bo Crowell’s direction.

Robert Hensley’s riveting “The Dark Sisters” is impressive, particularly Donovan Knowles’ betrayed soldier and the title trio of Sondra Mayer, Renee Mignosa and Dawn Worrall. Chantal Bilodeau’s haunting “The Miller’s Daughter” is the evening’s peak. Worrall’s hand-amputated heroine, Winn’s devil, Ryan Horner’s king, Mignosa’s double-duty moms and Christopher Spencer’s father are directed by L. Flint Esquerra with flair.

Energy abounds, and the decor suggests Andrei Serban on peyote. However, the theater-by-committee approach permits some self-indulgent ballast. Composer-conductor Brenda Varda’s ambitious Act 1 ballet, “The Good Mother,” is admirable but inconclusive. Spencer’s mugging as “Master Pfriem” falls flat, and comic examination of the Grimm’s grim savagery seems passe after “Into the Woods.” Family-friendly matinees are offered for concerned parents; orphans must decide for themselves.

-- David C. Nichols

“Tres Grimm! (Grimm III),” MET Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., L.A. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Family-friendly matinees, Sat., Feb. 14, 21, 28, 3 p.m. Ends March 6. $15; matinees, pay-what-you-can. (323) 957-1152. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

*

Bradbury’s old sod is cloddish

Two one-acts set in a remote Irish village at around the time of the 1916 troubles, “Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle” at Theatre West, are the latest in Ray Bradbury’s recent spate of plays adapted from his own works.

Produced by Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theatre Company and directed by his frequent collaborator, Charles Rome Smith, the piece is adapted from Bradbury’s book “Green Shadows, White Whale,” based on Bradbury’s experiences in Ireland while writing the screenplay for John Huston’s “Moby Dick.” If you’re lucky, Bradbury will make some charming pre-show remarks about his love affair with Ireland. Sadly, that impromptu commentary proved the highlight of an otherwise mundane evening.

The opener, “Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle,” is set in the neighborhood pub, where the locals gather for a leisurely snort or 12. But today, the usual rounds are interrupted by the arrival of an exotic stranger, Irish-born freethinker George Bernard Shaw (King Stuart). When Shaw’s “Luciferian mottoes” freeze the pub’s regulars into bizarre immobility, Shaw is taken to harsh task by local pastor Father Leary (Walter Beery). However, their acrimony is soon dispelled in a feel-good ending.

Stuart looks older than the Shaw of this time period, and he is so obviously grasping for his lines that we are left wondering whether he will find them. Also, the pub’s regulars are so dour and lifeless that, when they are “magically” frozen, the change is hardly noticeable.

In “The Great Conflagration,” the same boozy pub denizens attempt to burn down a nearby castle owned by Lord Kilgotten (assured Jay Gerber), who welcomes the arsonists with humorous composure. Although a welcome change from the opener, the piece fails to achieve comic momentum. Respectable yet plodding, it shuffles when it should romp.

-- F.K.F.

“Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle,” Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 28. $20. (323) 851-7977. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

*

All that buzzing has little to say

The pre-show minutes are like a trip down Alice’s rabbit hole. A field of flowers blooms upside-down from the ceiling of the Sacred Fools Theater Company’s lobby, and “The Flight of the Bumblebee” buzzes through the sound system as lights dim for the new play “Tell the bees.”

Then the performance begins -- and the fun ends.

To figure out what Padraic Duffy’s abstract play has to do with bees, one must first figure out what it has to do with the sculpture-making prisoner, the girls made of sugar, the clam-raking mother, the maple sap-collecting father, the randy sailors, the mushroom girl, the ... well, enough.

Duffy’s previous plays at Sacred Fools -- “Feet” and “The Mechanical Rabbit” -- also have challenged audiences to wrestle meaning from fanciful goings-on. In theory, that should work, as it does when people engage with symphonic music or nonrepresentational art. But Duffy -- who, in this script, is given to bursts of semi-poetry punctuated by profanity or sexual innuendo -- needs to post better signs if he wants audiences to be anything other than confused, bored or angry.

His work nevertheless receives a vivid staging. Designers Jeff Robinson (set and lights) and Elizabeth Barnes Keener (costumes) conjure a world of innocence, which is forever visited by strange or unwholesome things. Jessie Marion directs playfully, and the 16-member cast -- which includes Dean Cameron, Iris Bahr, Stephanie Dees, Crystal Keith and Vanessa Claire Smith -- performs with unhesitating commitment.

The story, which begins in a prison and escapes into storybook land, seems to be about getting outside one’s head and participating in the world, opening one’s heart to love. Or maybe not. Good luck making sense of it.

-- Daryl H. Miller

“Tell the bees.” Sacred Fools, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive, Hollywood. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends March 7. $15. (310) 281-8337. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.