Talkative trio rule ‘Queen of Sheba’

The gift of gab is a precious endowment for stage characters, whose well-turned words can make them larger than life in ways films can’t. When the short blond huckster Doc Honeygreen (Skip Pipo) enters the theater in “The Queen of Sheba” to pitch his “genuine all-American golden tonic,” he towers by sheer force of personality. He has us from hello.

So does playwright Bill Harris, whose play outlines an uneasy Depression-era triangle between the white Doc, his pretty black assistant Thalia (Pam Mack) and a black illusionist, ostensibly named Magic Tom (Spencer Scott), with a mysterious agenda and a dazzling verbal dexterity of his own.

The irresistible first act has the two men comparing notes on the life of the road. Doc sparks to Tom’s deft flattery and confidence, while Tom subtly homes in on Doc’s weak spot. Pipo and Scott play this suspenseful, slow-motion confrontation brilliantly, sizing each other up coolly behind the warm, easy laughter.

In the twist-filled second act, Harris expands the two-way dialogue to a contentious trio with the entrance of Mack’s feisty Thalia. There may be a few twists too many here, and too many speeches spelling out Harris’ ambitious themes. But “The Queen of Sheba,” directed with feeling and humor by Yvette Culver, remains one of the more entertaining and refreshingly uncondescending plays about race and commerce in America.

“Find a way to profit from every exchange” is Doc’s self-professed maxim. Audiences are likely to get something from most every exchange in “The Queen of Sheba.”

-- Rob Kendt

“The Queen of Sheba,” Unity Players Ensemble at the Stella Adler Theatre, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends Sept. 19. $20. (323) 860-3208. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

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A new spin on the Old West

If Sam Shepard wrote an episode of “King of the Hill,” or “Northern Exposure” had been set in Montana, the result might resemble Robert Tobin’s shaggy-dog story of a play, “Western Big Sky.”

Set chiefly in a ramshackle tavern run by a violently bickering couple, Hank (Britt George) and Dorothy (Barbara Bragg), the play spins out a series of unlikely confrontations, transgressive clinches and drunken exchanges among a gallery of outsized characters, from a trailer-trash hippie (Dan Mandel) to an unreconstructed latter-day cowboy (Tyler Tanner), from a mellow, erudite Native American (Rex Lee) to a pair of goth Satanists (Robert Benjamin and playwright Tobin).

It’s to Tobin’s credit that none of these potential stereotypes quite lives down to the expected cliches. The show’s nominal hero -- an impudent nonconformist named Bill (Donald Osborne), who says of his aimless existence, “There’s gotta be more” -- turns out to be a bit of a goofball, while two of the tavern’s more sedentary onlookers, Taylor (William Morton) and Cody (Kipp Chambers), take on unexpected dimensions, if not exactly what you’d call depth. And one light-in-his-boots cowpoke (Victor Yerrid) harbors a less well-kept secret.

After a while the play’s surprises tend to settle into a rhythm of willful quirkiness. And although director L. Flint Esquerra gives the proceedings a tone of droll whimsy that is genuinely funny, the play’s darker strains are awkwardly integrated: A pair of shooting deaths barely register, either as tragedy or as absurd accident.

Still, for laughs that flow and fizz as easily as beer, “Western Big Sky” makes a fine libation.

-- R.K.

“Western Big Sky,” the Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford St., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 2. $15. (323) 957-1152. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.