Babies -- a fertile topic for humor?

“The only trouble with adopting a Chinese baby is an hour later you want another one.” With facile groaners like these, who needs probing satire?

Not “Glory Pie,” John and Ellen Lawler’s breezy, innocuous and predictable new comedy about parenting and lifestyle choices loosely drawn from their own adoption experience. This is a play about showbiz types by showbiz types for showbiz types -- from its pre-show spin on the obligatory request to turn off cellphones (“your agent will call you back”), it clearly targets its audience and never pushes beyond its comfortable boundaries and assumptions.

A flair for comic exaggeration is the main strength here, as a capable cast provides the sparks during a dinner party at which fertility figures prominently. The guests, childless Laney (Carla Capps) and Carl (Dan Kinsella), are about to leave for China to pick up their baby; the hosts, Paula (Alyssa Stec) and Jake (Brendan O’Malley), have just discovered Paula is pregnant.

The necessary props are dutifully put in place: Nagging mother? Check -- offstage, but still a potent presence. Conflict to dance around? Check -- Paula doesn’t want to hurt Laney’s feelings/steal her sister’s thunder by revealing her pregnancy. Uninvited guests? Check -- the sexually uninhibited neighbors (and because this is theater, not TV, they can even use raunchy language) include the hedonistic actor (Tom Tate) -- Australian, naturally -- and his lingerie model girlfriend, Trent (Bree Turner) -- airhead, naturally. For good measure, they call in their wealthy African playboy friend (Darren Schnase) to serve as latter-day Shakespearean fool-who-utters-truths-others-dare-not.

Those “truths” cut through familiar self-absorbed obsessions -- Will I lose my figure? Will I lose my money belt? Is the wine sophisticated enough? -- to the revelation that “we should approach parenting consciously.”

And then we can go home.

-- Philip Brandes

“Glory Pie,” Coronet Theatre, 366 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 3 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 21. $20 and $25. (310) 657-7377. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Family, a trusted source of strife

“We’re only as sick as our secrets,” goes a key line from “Manner of Trust” at the Underground Theatre. True, and while author Bo White’s deeply felt tale of buried trauma and hypnotherapy has its quirks, its mix of raucous Texas Gothic and urban psychodrama is nonetheless gripping.

It starts with oral-fixated Doug Hill (Frayne Rosanoff) waking from a nightmare behind the curtains that enfold the metal grids of John H. Binkey’s impressive set. A shift of drapes puts us in the Manhattan high-rise office of Dr. Beth Cooper (Yassmin Alers), the court-appointed therapist whose evaluation is miscreant Doug’s last chance to avoid incarceration. The mixed messages and obscenities that Doug uses to keep others at bay do not fool Dr. Cooper. Her no-nonsense empathy isn’t lost on Doug, who nurses wounds he can’t recall, and the sessions begin.

As they progress, “Manner of Trust” suffuses careful realism with vividly skewered, seriocomic flashbacks to Doug’s clinically corrosive family in Dallas. Chain-smoking mother Marilyn (Diane Perell), belittling stepfather Al (James McMurray) and especially sister Ashlee-Jo (Nicole Stewart), a Brenda Lee wannabe, seem obvious in their contributions to Doug’s self-hatred.

That is what White wants us to think, for his narrative builds to a wrenching final twist. Director Jon Lawrence Rivera helms a smooth Playwrights’ Arena mounting, the designers shrewd, the worthy cast ignited by Rosanoff’s riveting survivor, convincing as tortured adult and heart-rending 11-year-old. “Manner of Trust” needs further refining -- expansion of Dr. Cooper’s transference, trimming back clinical details, rethinking the intermission -- but its core issues are hypnotic.

-- David C. Nichols

“Manner of Trust,” Underground Theatre, 1312 N. Wilton Place, Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 28. Adult audiences. $20. (213) 627-4473. Running time: 2 hours.

Disorient ‘em, by hook or by ‘Crook’

There are undeniably daring aspects to “The Crook: A Revival,” which inhabits the Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station like a goblin in a playpen. Ferocious postmodernists Michael Sakamoto, Rochelle Fabb and their Empire of Teeth crew throw themselves into this ambitious, still-coagulating ritual installation.

Vaguely inspired by “The Black Crook,” the 1866 melodrama credited as Broadway’s first musical, “The Crook” combines bits of text with geopolitical performance art of unusual opacity. A Jackson Pollock-esque canvas greets us as we enter the space, where a mound of dirt, a sheet-metal mirror and a catapult-like contraption frame a vaudeville platform. The audience surrounds a box that’s tap dancing, over which hangs a chandelier of I.V. bags that feed a wine-glass fountain. Bob Bellerue’s disorienting score ebbs and five archetypes assemble and stare, at us. They speak, and it’s anyone’s guess.

Sakamoto’s director figure turns Fred Astaire into a Mephistophelean crook. Or is Michael Morrisey, fearless whether dropping trou as Andy Warhol or scaring us silly as Jim Jones, the satanic envoy? Fabb’s arch actress and goddess archetype suggests Shakespeare’s Titania rewritten by Anne Rice. Joe Seely embodies the Faustian element as hambone actor, howling artist and haggard soldier

At the reviewed performance, passages of Richard Foreman-worthy abstraction gave way to stretches of pure oddity. The neck-straining seating (and eventual seat clearance) certainly keeps you alert. Fans of deconstruction should check it out, for there’s surely nothing quite like it, but prepare to be perplexed, and don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

-- D.C.N.

“The Crook: A Revival,” Track 16 Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building C-1, Santa Monica. 8:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Ends May 6. Adult audiences. $15. (310) 392-9396. Running time: 1 hour.