LaBute premiere hits home

“You stepped over the line.” Those words, which begin “The Shape of Things,” supply the first clue to Neil LaBute’s dark comic take on the subjectivity of surface truth. In its Los Angeles County premiere, this icily effective Furious Theatre mounting hides sober motives behind a hip, cynical facade.

A London smash in its 2001 Almeida Theatre premiere, “Shape of Things” moved to Broadway, then became a LaBute-directed 2003 film.

Writer LaBute, whose current play, “Fat Pig,” has Manhattan abuzz, is no stranger to cultural provocation. The opening quote of “Shape” comes from college museum employee Adam (subtle Brad Price) as he confronts activist Evelyn (Vonessa Martin, atop her game). Evelyn, a beautiful MFA candidate, defaces an ineptly censored nude male statue in protest. Seeing the charm beneath Adam’s geek veneer, Evelyn also spray-paints her number inside his jacket.

Enter Adam’s cocksure roommate, Phillip (Shawn Lee); also Phillip’s fiancee, Jenny (Sara Hennessy). Evelyn raises Phillip’s ire while coaxing the smitten Adam into ever-increasing physical change, which causes old friend Jenny to regard him anew.

But LaBute, a master chronicler of upended misogyny, is after more than just a caustic collegiate cousin to Patrick Marber’s “Closer.” The whopping albeit manipulative climax carries LaBute’s thesis, best left unrevealed.

Director Damaso Rodriguez rallies sleek designs, notably Melissa Teoh’s set and Christie Wright’s lighting. The sharp players sculpt the abrasive idiom with clinical precision, which causes some lapses in tempo. Still, LaBute fans may find “The Shape of Things” perversely intriguing, though dubious as first-date fare.

-- David C. Nichols

“The Shape of Things,” Balcony Theatre Upstairs at the Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb. 20. Mature audiences. (626) 356-7529 or www.furioustheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

*

‘Nunsense’ cooks up role for Garrett

Sporting new scripture and verse, the born-again “Nunsense” at Theatre West is an answer to the prayers of -- well, “Nunsense” worshipers, at least. With writer/creator Dan Goggin at the director’s helm, we can certainly take this version -- revisions and all -- as gospel.

Unapologetically silly as ever, and strewn with groaners and bad puns (“St. Francis was a sissy”), Goggin’s satire about a quintet of nuns from Hoboken putting on a fundraising talent show in a high school gym is the kind of send-up only someone heavily steeped in Catholicism could dream up. Viewers of all faiths, however, will find the laughs come with little penance to be paid in this amiable revival.

This time, Goggin added dialogue and a new song after Broadway and TV veteran (and Theatre West Board member) Betty Garrett expressed interest in joining the production. To make room for her, Goggin penned an onstage visitation from the previously unseen Sister Julia, Child of God, a hapless cook whose botulism-laced vichyssoise accelerated the heavenly ascension of most of the convent. An ageless trouper, Garrett is amusingly dotty and tap dances with miraculous aplomb.

As the even more scatterbrained nun with no memory of her past, Barbara Mallory’s gem of a performance makes Sister Mary Amnesia not only funny but endearing. Speaking in tongues (however firmly in cheek), Lee Meriwether adopts a Joisey accent for Sister Robert Anne, the star-struck nun from the wrong side of the tracks. Adding to the fun are Bridget Hanley’s emotive “Dying Nun Ballet,” Sandra Tucker’s stern Mother Superior giddily succumbing to the fumes of airplane glue and Rhonda Stovey belting out the “Holier Than Thou” finale.

For all its reveling in Catholicism’s foibles, what keeps “Nunsense” from becoming mean-spirited is Goggin’s obvious underlying affection for the structure and stability his upbringing provided. Meriwether’s “Growing Up Catholic” number at the start of Act 2 suspends satire to express that sentiment with heartfelt sincerity.

-- Philip Brandes

“Nunsense,” Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends March 6. $30. (323) 851-7977 or www.theatrewest.org. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

*

Modern touch to old-fashioned tale

Given its hip showbiz pedigree, “Love Tapes” by Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) and Steven Banks (who writes for TV’s “SpongeBob SquarePants”) naturally raises expectations for edgy, outrageous humor. And it delivers.

Yet underneath its setting in the raucous world of rock music, occasional nudity and audience participation, this new two-character comedy at Sacred Fools Theater turns out to be a surprisingly sweet, old-fashioned love story about lonely hearts seeking to pierce the isolation of modern life.

The fragmented nature of high-tech communication figures prominently for two alienated characters whose lives revolve -- for very different reasons -- around a charismatic rock star. The play opens with Melinda (Julie Mullen) filming her declaration of love to her idol (“I’m not a groupie,” she insists defensively). What starts out as a case of embarrassingly dopey and desperate infatuation quickly deepens into poignant revelation in Mullen’s skillfully modulated performance.

We’re already primed for more substantial characters by the time we meet Carl (Dean Cameron), the rock star’s personal assistant (“I’m not a roadie,” he insists defensively). A hopeless nerd trying to be hip by association, Carl is also given to courtship via videotape. Carl’s desperation matches Melinda’s note for note, setting up an emotional payoff when circumstances conspire to bring them together.

Director Jessie Marion and her cast get the romantic tone exactly right, making this pair of outsiders sympathetic without sentimentally glossing over their shortcomings. In a quirky but problematic staging conceit (inherited from Penn & Teller’s Broadway and Las Vegas shows), the performers pull audience members onstage to pose as friends helping their characters film their confessionals. While Cameron and Mullen remain impressively in-character during these improvised -- and usually quite funny -- exchanges, the gimmick’s cleverness works at cross-purposes to the story’s emotional simplicity.

Having set up a pair of believably complex characters and getting us to care about them, the disappointingly facile resolution needs reworking to offer a true second act. In its current form, “Love Tapes” remains an entertaining but curious mix of staging savvy and playwriting naivete.

-- Philip Brandes

“Love Tapes,” Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N Heliotrope Drive, Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Also 8 p.m. Feb. 14. Ends Feb. 20. $20. (310) 281-8337 or www.sacredfools.org. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

*

43 twists on ‘Seagull’ scene

There are veritable novels of subtext buried in Chekhov’s plays. Typically actors and scholars are the specialists who plumb those depths between the lines, but with “The Nina Variations,” playwright Steven Dietz joins in, taking apart the heartbreaking penultimate scene of “The Seagull” like a watch repairman spilling gears out of an old timepiece.

In 43 brisk iterations, Dietz tinkers with the scene’s clockwork to see if Treplev, Chekhov’s suicidal young writer, can “rewrite” his final encounter with Nina, the neophyte actress who’s returned from Moscow bruised by love and humbled by the stage. In director Hope Alexander’s L.A. premiere staging, Dietz’s irreverent wit comes through in spades. “A seagull to a lake?” Nina (Khamara Pettus) asks of the play’s portentous central image. As Treplev, long-faced, middle-aged Alan Altshuld makes the writer’s complaints and equivocations fretfully funny, particularly when he momentarily acquires a knowing, sarcastic bite. “If we can’t have strong feelings about things we know nothing about,” he wonders, “how could we ever fall in love?”

The show is less successful as a meditation on faith and discontent, partly because Alexander has two other Ninas onstage: one a 50-ish broad (Bobbi Stamm) with a ladies-who-lunch swagger, the other an amorphous, flighty creature (Maria Kress). This proves more distracting than revealing, since by herself the mercurial Pettus captures all of Nina’s facets, from naive to wised-up.

Lighting designer Dan Weingarten bathes Alexander’s crumpled-paper set in a rainbow of lovely hues. If only the show achieved as wide a spectrum of feeling and insight.

-- Rob Kendt

“The Nina Variations,” the Company Rep, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb. 19. $15 to $22.50. (866) 811-4111. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.