A celebrity circus, in two rings

“Little” is anything but. Writ large across the Actors’ Gang stage, this descent into the creepier side of the underage pop diva phenomenon sports edgy performances and raucous, confrontational staging -- business as usual from a theater company that consistently pushes boundaries in striking ways.

Playwright-actor Angela Berliner’s hallucinatory drama explores a long-standing fascination with celebrity at an unnaturally young age. Parallel stories trace the careers of two girls named Little at different points in history -- one a contemporary virgin/sexpot teen idol in the Britney Spears mold, the other a child vaudeville star from the turn of the previous century.

Casting grown-up author Berliner (as the modern Little) alongside her identical twin sister, Jordana Berliner (as her early-1900s predecessor), is only the jumping-off point for the increasingly bizarre and unsettling imagery in Shira Piven’s carnival-esque staging, which employs extensive starkly ominous and at times suggestively grotesque choreography by Piven and Lindsley Allen. Particularly atmospheric is the orphanage run by a Dickensian headmistress (a sardonic Adele Robbins), who gleefully doles out undeserved punishments and pushes Jordana’s Little 1 into performing like a trained circus animal.

Though Angela Berliner’s Little 2 has an unseen stage mother (who helps her pick out her skimpy outfits), she’s no better off emotionally -- both are driven by their unfulfilled hunger for love and acceptance into self-destructive career flameouts. Through dual roles, the supporting cast amplifies the common threads in the Littles’ mirrored lives: the industry professionals who manipulate and exploit them (Miles Stroth), the media predators who feast on their popularity (Monique McIntyre) and the spurned would-be boyfriends (Kimo Wills) whose sincere affections neither Little can recognize or appreciate.

Berliner’s probing script is equally unsparing of the leering, voyeuristic social environment that spawns the Littles’ stardom. Some levity pierces the darkness in wittily observed hallmarks of the contemporary pop star: the manufactured romance with a heartthrob rapper (Anthony Bravo), the “live” concert using prerecorded vocal tracks, the anguished narcissistic wail: “My head hurts from thinking about myself.”

While the dialogue is serviceable, it rarely sparkles -- “Little” is a freak show drawn in broad strokes, not nuance.

-- Philip Brandes

“Little,” The Actors’ Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. (except June 13 at 7 p.m.). Ends July 25. $20. (323) 465-0566 or www.theactorsgang.com. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

*

Footloose fun in parody ‘Lame!’

Self-referential glee punches through “Lame!” at Stages. Writer-director Rich Nathanson’s garage-show assault on the dancing-for-your-life movie oeuvre of the 1980s is a rudely risible Tinseltown travesty.

Footloose hunklet Bacon Swayze (Doug Steves) dirty dances because of dead love Baby, her ashes stashed in an Oscar. Stuttering virgin Orson (Peter James Smith) seeks fame, hearkening after his acting idol, Greg Kinnear.

Flash-dancing Murray (Michelle Merring) flees her father, husband and Irene Cara complications, blank eyes wide open behind the welder’s mask.

Their formulas congeal at the Los Angeles Music and Ego competition, which provides “Lame’s” most surreal laughs. The unhinged cast exploits the title ethic through deliberately execrable songs and choreographer Evita Arce’s pseudo-Jeffrey Hornaday spasms, to cackling effect. Steves, Smith and Merring inhale Nathanson’s goofball conceit, as do their colleagues in multiple roles. Running jokes include Tyler Tanner’s emphatic celebrity encounters (“Yes. I am George Clooney.”); Jackson Varady as the requisite scheming rival; and Juliette Storace’s pixilated spirit of Baby. And the howling, femme-to-femme turns by Mauri Bernstein and Jenny Powazek carry all before them.

This is fortunate. Nathanson’s sketch-show blackouts, obscure in-jokes and already dated industry gossip straddle a constant line between skewering mediocrity and succumbing to mediocrity. Some bits are strictly barroom fodder.

Though the basement-budget tech tries, particularly Aaron Francis’ resourceful lighting, its execution does not exactly crackle. Yet despite (or because of) the gamely threadbare trappings and gamy tabloid tactics, “Lame!” is a raucous guilty pleasure -- like the genre it trashes. Mary-Kate and Ashley, beware.

-- David C. Nichols

“Lame!” Stages Theatre Center, 1540 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Fridays, Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 26. Mature audiences. $18. (323) 692-1088. Running time: 70 minutes.

*

Evil is afoot at ‘Midnight’

“I self-destruct on explanation” is the unanswerable disclaimer of two characters in Kirk Wood Bromley’s dizzyingly word-crammed crackpot cartoon “Midnight Brainwash Revival.” This might be Bromley’s defense too, since his effusively kooky writing defies close scrutiny, even as his high-wire wordplay rewards amused attention. Indeed, with a sensational cast under director Alexander Yannis Stephano’s expert guidance, “Midnight” seesaws with near-perfect balance between gleeful scatology and tongue-twisting linguistic trickery -- something like an episode of “South Park” as written by Mac Wellman.

The sleepy desert town of Moab, Utah -- which in reality as in the play sits near megatons of buried nuclear waste -- is under threat from an evil developer with a pesky traveling tumor and, in Christopher Paul Hart’s droll performance, a ticklish verbal dexterity.

An alliance with Moab’s right-wing mayor (Dan Etheridge) stumbles when a hippie huckster (Joe Jordan) slips the mayor a funny cigar. And the plot to buy the land from its citified heir (Eric Giancoli) snags on the resistance of his conscientious sister (Jacy Gross) and the pretty persuasion of a local cowboy (Liesel Kopp).

Along the way we meet a pair of hapless mercenaries (Paul Plunkett, Mark McClain Wilson), a confused cross-dresser (Ted DeVirgilis), a trio of airhead tourists (Gary Ballard, M.E. Dunn, Annie Abrams), a strident city broad (Diana Jellinek), a ditzy flunkie (Philip Wofford), a soft-hearted cop (Adam Harrington) and a shape-shifting trickster (Kyle Ingleman).

Scurrying tirelessly around Dunn’s Wile E. Coyote set, this motley bunch nails Bromley’s animated metier with utter conviction, if not explication.

-- Rob Kendt

“Midnight Brainwash Revival,” Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive, Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 26. $15. (310) 281-8337. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

*

‘Passing’ through a time of change

A welcome change of pace from politically correct black-and-white solutions to the problems of blacks and whites, writer-director Pete Riesenberg’s new drama, “Two Ships Passing,” treats race relations with the kind of sophistication and complexity rarely seen since the plays of Philip Barry.

Set amid the rarefied snobbery of Boston high society in 1962, this well-acted period piece is a snapshot of America in the early days of the civil rights movement. Caught in the winds of change are two light-skinned sisters who’ve managed to pass for white. Prim and proper Doris (Claudia Mason) has married into a prominent Irish American family with more than a passing similarity to the Kennedys. Her more rebellious sibling, Loreen (Barbara Koval), is about to wed an illustrious black professor of history (Amos Cowson), and much to Doris’ dismay, she’s invited their estranged father (William Stanford Davis) to walk her down the aisle, a move with guaranteed scandalous consequences.

The era’s backdrop of racism is ever-present -- an upscale hotel bartender (Thomas Michael Clemons) and waitress (Jennifer Blake) refuse to serve the professor; a snooty socialite (Marcia Loring) wants to throw away her gloves and handkerchief after they’ve been touched by a black waiter (Ernie King).

Yet Riesenberg’s principal characters are full of surprises. Doris’ blueblood husband, Dan (Sean Christian), sincerely wants to bridge the racial divide despite his blueblood breeding; ironically, their marital tensions are not over her black origins but rather the trust shattered by her having concealed them from him for so long. The high-minded professor is not above some bigoted meanness of his own, while Dan’s black-sheep brother (Doug Bellitto) proves capable of unexpected heroism. Doris’ father has the wisdom to recognize that the “right” thing to do at the wedding might not be the best thing for his daughters’ happiness.

While the plot is almost jarringly formal in its construction by today’s standards, and the requisite scene changes between hotel suite and lobby bar are a strain on limited production resources, a committed ensemble nails the play’s tough-minded compassion with commendable emotional effect and minimal preachiness. We have made strides since 1962, Riesenberg reminds us -- progress that is slow and partial is progress nonetheless.

-- P.B.

“Two Ships Passing,” Pan Andreas Theatre, 5125 Melrose Ave. (rear building), Los Angeles. Fridays, Saturdays, 8:05 p.m.; Sundays, 7:05 p.m. Ends June 20. $15. (323) 467-7237. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.