A big, four-footed metaphor for racism

In “Hanging Alice,” an idiosyncratic but engaging new comedy about a wayward elephant put on trial for attempted murder, writer-director Rick Pagano successfully parlays his personal fixations into broad social satire.

Set in Savannah, Ga., in 1963 and based on a reportedly real-life incident that rankled Pagano for years, the play evokes Southern bigotry at the dawn of the civil rights era. In a metaphor for institutionalized racism, all the town’s narrow-minded fury is heaped on Alice, a mistreated circus animal whose brief escape from captivity resulted in the accidental injury of a young boy. An angry mob now seeks retribution by lynching Alice from a hooked crane, but spunky, free-spirited schoolteacher Nancy (Lisa Rotondi) objects and forces a legal hearing to determine the elephant’s fate.

On one level, the play delights with old-fashioned romantic chemistry that develops between Rotondi and McCaleb Burnett as Ward Brando, the local prosecutor and a rising political star being groomed for higher office, as they argue opposing sides at the hearing. Under the influence of Nancy, whose nonconformist attitude and outfits prefigure the rebellious spirit of the late ‘60s, Ward begins to examine his reflexively traditional values.

Ward’s newfound tolerance is a great annoyance to his fiancee (Darby Stanchfield), a hilariously manicured and manipulative Southern belle, and his mentor, a sleazy senator (Sam Hennings) who cares more about political expediency than truth or justice.

Adding a surreal edge to Pagano’s allegory, Alice is a talking, quasi-mystical figure -- a man reincarnated as a female elephant -- portrayed with heartbreaking sympathy by Monty Blanc. In an inspired bit of staging and costuming, Raymond Cruz is split down the middle between two grotesque characters, a leering white scumbag and an ignorant black convict; he appears as each by keeping one side or the other to the audience at all times.

Don’t be lulled by the show’s goofy premise and breezy overall tone -- there are sharp turns ahead into uncomfortable but insightful territory.

-- Philip Brandes

“Hanging Alice,” Elephant Lab Theatre, 1078 Lillian Way, Hollywood. Resumes Jan. 6. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Jan. 29. $20. (323) 960-7846 or www.plays411.com/alice. Running time: 2 hours.

*

Childhood tales from Capote

Truman Capote’s childhood bond with an elderly misfit cousin in 1930s rural Alabama inspired two richly evocative autobiographical reminiscences: “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “A Christmas Memory.”

Adapted by Russell Vandenbroucke, these pieces about 7-year-old Buddy and 60-ish childlike Sook -- whose fierce friendship is born out of their “separate loneliness” -- make up the initially uneven but rewarding “Holiday Memories,” at the Fremont Centre Theatre.

“The Thanksgiving Visitor” is the more robust, less heart-tugging of the two. In it, Buddy’s tormentor, Odd (Dutch Marich), labels the younger boy a sissy, but it is vengeful Buddy (Jim Cathcart) who is the shaken recipient of Sook’s lesson about the “unpardonable sin” of cruelty.

Capote’s language, wit and pathos come through, but most of the cast here keeps to a surface rhythm. With physical fights too emphatic for the small stage, “Visitor” seems essentially a warm-up act for the more elegiac “A Christmas Memory.”

Gary Gardner is pitch-perfect throughout as narrator Truman, observing with wry humor and aching compassion his younger self and the mentally fragile Sook, allied against rigid adults. On Tom Cannon’s angled set, lighted with soulful regard by Deena Mullen, that narration is often a three-way conversation, deftly staged by Sarah Zinsser.

Telford and Cathcart, deeply resonant in “Memory,” offer all the subtleties of child’s-eye joys and heartbreak as Buddy and Sook buy whiskey for their fruitcakes, seek the perfect Christmas tree and forget their sorrows in a kite-flying day of piercing sweetness.

-- Lynne Heffley

Holiday Memories, Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena, 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday; ends Sunday. $20. (323) 960-7612. www.plays411.com/holiday. Running time: 2 hours

*

Geopolitical and droll

Audiences who value original wit might check out “States of Mind,” which ends Sunday at the Hollywood Court Theater. Author Yale Udoff brings a casually droll sense of geopolitical satire to these two well-played absurdist one-acts, produced by Laurelgrove Theatre Company.

Both plays turn on Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. First up is “Nebraska,” an insidious tale of American shadow governance. Parodies of current-day archetypes convene in a “top-top secret” meeting to glean the president’s solution to the Middle East crisis, which involves Israel, Native Americans and the Cornhusker state. Scott Mitchell Nelson’s CNN pundit and Abbott Alexander’s executive envoy are standout opposites of comic attack. Jack Heller’s tippling general, Matt Kimbrough’s blustery minister, Nameer El-Kadi and Goreti Da Silva as pivotal pawns and Daniel Sielski’s covert stenographer complete the cast.

“The Little Gentleman,” is less conclusive, its assimilation-vs.-tradition fable most notable for the visual conceit. Baby Ronald (the unfettered Tom O’Keefe), a romper-clad adult with a British accent and a hunger for birthday pie, begs affluent Mother (Kara Pulcino) to tell him her “Christian name.” Traditionalist grandmother Dora (Jacqueline Scott), controlled by her daughter’s purse strings, and Sylvia (Louise Davis), Mother’s funeral-hopping crony, complicate the plot, which begins in Christopher Durang land and ends south of Jean Genet.

Here, the occasional slack in director Al Bonadies’ otherwise sturdy staging, which only nominally taxes “Nebraska,” reveals Udoff’s seams, though it is amusing to watch O’Keefe gurgle and keen. As it plays out on Tom Meleck’s two-faced set, “States of Mind” is worthy, but some coffee wouldn’t hurt.

-- David C. Nichols

“States of Mind,” Hollywood Court Theater, 6817 Franklin Ave., L.A. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday. Ends Sunday. $20. (323) 692-8200. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

*

‘Nickleby’ would please Dickens

A puff of dry ice, the chimes of Big Ben, and we’re off to the not-so merry 19th century England whose social injustices were so starkly chronicled by Charles Dickens in “Nicholas Nickleby.”

Compared to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s famed two-night mega-staging from the 1980s, an ambitious new adaptation by Gregory Blair at the Complex mercifully clocks in at under three hours. August Vivirito’s rapidly paced direction ensures that boredom is never a problem. However, Dickens’ rambling, episodic story (originally published in serial installments) doesn’t receive the breathing room here to fully develop its wonderfully eccentric characters. Too often, we race through major plot points in the company of broadly sketched caricatures.

Even so, those sketches manage to differentiate the principal antagonists. As the titular hero, a young man of few means but lofty ideals trying to make his way in a hard world, handsome Ethan Kogan oozes decency and compassion in the face of the horrors he encounters along the way.

In the most harrowing episodes, Dickens exposed the boarding school as nothing more than a cruel penal colony for unwanted children, a corrupt system personified by the squalid, one-eyed headmaster (Scot Renfro).

The real villain of the piece is Nicholas’ greedy uncle Ralph, played by Steven Connor with continuous mustache-twirling glee (no mean feat for a clean-shaven man).

A period costume drama spanning many months in which characters are only budgeted one costume each proved distracting even to the Scrooge in me. Are there no workhouses? Are there no laundromats?

Limited production resources notwithstanding, this energetic adaptation captures the essential appeal that evokes nostalgia for Dickens’ worldview amid today’s spin zones: his utter lack of moral ambiguity. Those were the good old days, even when they were bad.

-- P.B.

“Nicholas Nickleby,” Flight Theatre at the Complex, 6472 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Jan. 15. $20. (310) 880-1016. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.