Provocative ‘Blasted’ from Rude Guerrilla

The 1995 Royal Court opening of “Blasted” struck London’s theatrical establishment like a missile. Critical outrage turned Sarah Kane’s Bosnia-inspired first play into a cause celebre, with Harold Pinter, Edward Bond and Caryl Churchill among its advocates.

After Kane’s 1999 suicide at age 28, the 2001 Jerwood Theatre revival found many observers retracting their attacks. “Blasted” indicts war’s insanity from inside the madness it creates, as the Santa Ana-based Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s California premiere staging at GTC Burbank demonstrates.

Act 1 takes a fishbowl view of tabloid journalist Ian (Bryan Jennings) and his ex-girlfriend Cate (Hillary Calvert), in an upscale Leeds hotel room. The scabrous experiential tactics portend black comedy of menace, until a ravenous soldier (Ryan Harris) and an explosion bring on intermission.

Act 2 deconstructs chaos, in a horrific antiwar tract of harrowing topicality and graphically disturbing imagery.

Director-designer Dave Barton’s forces display preternatural resourcefulness. Jennings endures the atrocities without ego. Calvert’s childlike intensity resembles a female Derek Jacobi. Harris, amazing as ever, draws a hellish archetype with unavoidable 9/11 and Abu Ghraib associations.

Given logistical limitations and budgetary constraints, the technical work is heroic, with Dawn Hess’ lighting and David Gallo’s sound typically creative.

The extremity of Kane’s provocation, which stretches through Beckett and Brecht to the Jacobeans and Euripides, ripping them into now, cannot be overstated. Taking on imperialist hubris has grown only more inflammatory since 1995, and “Blasted” has Pasolini contours.

Unflinching viewers and members of every in-your-face entity from the Actors’ Gang to the Zoo District should witness these Orange County renegades’ first Los Angeles-area appearance. Conservative audiences must consider their constitution.

-- David C. Nichols

“Blasted,” Rude Guerrilla Theater Company at GTC Burbank, 1111-B W. Olive Ave., Burbank. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays. Dark July 4. Ends July 25. No one under 17 admitted without an adult. $20. (818) 257-4952. Running time: 2 hours.

*

A satirical take on Hearst abduction

Ken Prestininzi’s “Patty Cake,” now in its world premiere at the Met’s Great Scott Theatre, is similar to Prestininzi’s previous play “Amerikafka,” also a Met production, in several respects. Both are surreal satires about historical characters -- Patricia Hearst and Franz Kafka, respectively -- and both deal with issues of identity confusion, namely, just how amorphous an individual’s grasp on reality can become, especially in reaction to personal adversity.

However, where “Amerikafka” featured a big cast, diverse locales and plenty of digressive philosophizing, “Patty Cake” has three actors, one setting and a running time of barely 50 minutes. Although a bit underdeveloped at this point, Prestininzi’s cogent, funny play covers some weighty matters indeed.

As the lights go up on a mostly bare stage, we see Patty Cake (Laura Caputo) crouched under a table, while her high-priced “mouthpiece,” Baker (David H. Bickford), sits nearby. After her abduction by a black power “army,” Patty participated in a bank robbery and now faces a long jail term. Baker is coaching Patty before her upcoming jury trial, but their “role-playing” soon takes a bizarre turn. Initially abject and terrified, Patty soon takes on the identity of her African American abductor, binding and gagging Baker in short order. By turns, both also impersonate various other characters, including Patty’s rich but troubled parents. Events take a genuinely creepy turn when an actress (Renee Mignosa) who is playing Patty on film arrives on the scene.

Director L. Flint Esquerra keeps the pacing crisp and the tone effectively unsettling. Bickford and Mignosa are excellent. Bickford alternates between authoritarian zeal and nerdy ineffectualness, while Mignosa is suitably shallow and egocentric. Yet it is Caputo who gives the most effectively inflammatory performance. A rubber-faced character with admirable comic timing, she strikes just the right balance between the absurd and the terrifying in Prestininzi’s slight but genuinely disturbing play.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“Patty Cake,” Met’s Great Scott Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends July 25. (Dark July 4.) $10. (323) 957-1152. Running time: 50 minutes.

*

He’s a man with no convictions

Audiences may experience jet lag after viewing “18 Arrests, No Convictions,” Michael Drescher’s shaggy-dog solo show.

That’s not only because he rushes through his text in a nervous blur. It’s also because listening to Drescher’s rambling mix of tall-tale anecdotes and banal life lessons uncannily resembles being stuck on an airplane next to a ceaseless talker whose initial charm wears thin after the third Bloody Mary.

By his own account, Drescher, a blustery 50-ish bachelor, has always been something of a rogue and a rebel. In childhood he was visited by angels and other fantastical creatures that seemed as real to him as his own family. In his teens he found reliable comfort in spirits of another kind; among its other attractions, alcohol proved to be a sure-fire cure for his youthful stutter.

Despite all this, Drescher and his strait-laced brother went on to form JDTV, a television-listings business acquired by Tribune Media Services in 1999. For his part, Drescher found spiritual healing in the form of audiotapes by James van Praagh and Leo Buscaglia. If he’s been to AA, or any other brand of substance-abuse program, we don’t hear about it here. Instead we get a coy reference to a series of “single-car accidents.”

Apparently Drescher’s family and friends lovingly called his mix of mischief and imagination “The Mike Show.” But even under the polished direction of Justin A. Yoffe, this Mike Show is more therapy than theater.

-- Rob Kendt

“18 Arrests, No Convictions,” One Tribe & Theater Planners at the Court Theatre, 722 N. La Cienega, West Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends July 11. $18. (310) 924-8628. Running time: 2 hours.

*

An absurdist slant on serial murderer

In choosing a serial killer as the antihero of his absurdist drama “Roberto Zucco,” the late French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltes set out to explore evil not so much in terms of its banality as its pervasiveness.

Director Russell Milton and his hardworking 21-member cast make the theme of society’s preoccupation with violence abundantly clear in a stylish staging for Open Fist Theatre Company, even when there’s less to the material than meets the eye.

Inspired by real-life events, the episodic play follows the title character (Patrick Tuttle) on a killing spree after his escape from prison, where he was sent for murdering his father. We view events through Koltes’ clinical, nonjudgmental eye; without making excuses for Zucco, he creates a context in which everyone else behaves with equal savagery and selfishness.

Because Zucco achieves a measure of self-awareness the other characters lack, he becomes sympathetic by default as he wanders among them like Frankenstein’s monster -- the shadow side of themselves they can’t accept. On his odyssey, Zucco befriends an alienated girl (Jennifer Pennington) who’s sold into prostitution by her abusive brother (Weston Blakesley), and takes hostage a bored aristocrat (Michelle Haner) who confesses her attraction to him after he shoots her teenage child (Sabrina Bernasconi).

Broken pieces that cannot be put back together are part of the recurring imagery both in dialogue and Eric Hugunin’s stunning set. A haunting monologue by Andrea Fears voices the fragmentation and rage of an entire society -- a high point of Martin Crimp’s vivid translation.

The ensemble does excellent work filling in the specifics of characters penned in broad strokes. Still, when it comes to outlandish behavior set against an abstract archetypal tableau, Eugene Ionesco covered much of the same territory half a century earlier, and more eloquently. Koltes’ play raises a valid point about the uncomfortably fragile boundary that keeps people from acting out their most destructive impulses. Still, it’s a boundary that most do not cross, and portraying a world in which everyone does is a little too easy -- it’s an end run around the much harder task of showing how those impulses manifest themselves more covertly in everyday behavior.

As a result, the world of “Roberto Zucco” is steeped in edginess without much consequence.

-- Philip Brandes

“Roberto Zucco,” Open Fist Theatre, 1625 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends July 17. $18 (Sundays pay-what-you-can). (323) 882-6912. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.