They’ve got the look but not the plot

Ryan Heffington’s “Stabbing the Classics” begins with a deliberately over-the-top parody of ‘50s sitcom domesticity featuring Lisa K. Lock as a terminally devoted housewife who plunges into suicidal despair -- and a handy bathtub -- when success lures hubby Ramon del Barrio away from her.

Unfortunately, after this broadly comic opening, Heffington’s scattershot two-act dance drama asks us to take Lock and Del Barrio seriously as they suffer through curiously uneventful episodes set in a Purgatory that’s half Goth fantasy and half alternative fashion parade.

At the Open Fist Theatre in Hollywood on Saturday, hooded monks showing a lot of chest stalked the stage between assaults by rock wantons in mini-tutus, fringed shoulder pads and pompom caps.

Heffington designed some of the costumes; others were credited to Grey Ant, Battlefield Fashion, Mikiko, Nina McNeely, Scott Grandis, Derek Martin -- and Justin Bailey, creator of the wire masks that turned the resident doxies into hounds of hell.

These costume credits are not incidental, since many, many scenes depended on sudden switcheroos as well as stripping or getting stripped, involving apparel from business suits to the monks’ robes to an ensemble of leather straps. Lock and Del Barrio spent a great deal of Act 2 writhing in nothing but briefs, but their nudity, emotionalism -- and the resolution of their story -- never formed a strong enough rack to hang a quasi-mystical fashion show upon.

Heffington is best known in the local dance community as a lead dancer in Kitty McNamee’s Hysterica company, but he’s not yet the storyteller she is, and it’s no coincidence that she co-choreographed some of the evening’s most purposeful sequences.

The least purposeful may have been a party interlude choreographed by Karim Cheikh Ali, Tabitha and Napoleon, Karen Dyer and Heffington -- but at least this desperate-to-please celebration gave the large, accomplished corps more to do than merely oppress the leads.

Using an assortment of recorded music that proved as bold and varied as the costuming, Heffington and his collaborators did conjure up some arresting imagery: an enormous grinding wheel, for instance, made from men’s bodies, or a panorama of dancers hovering over their fallen partners.

Otherwise, “Stabbing the Classics” belonged to Lock in a fabulously skillful, heroic performance: on top of every moment, able to rise above the most outrageous actions and outfits to embody an ideal of intense, coherent dance-theater that the work as a whole needed to emulate.

*

‘Stabbing

the Classics’

Where: Open Fist Theatre, 1625 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood

When: Thursday through Sunday

Price: $20

Contact: (310) 305-9634