‘Turn of the Screw’ gets stripped down

Subtle frissons accompany “The Turn of the Screw” at Pacific Resident Theatre. Under director Robert Bailey’s evocative guidance, actors Tracie Lockwood and Matthew Elkins give spine to this barebones adaptation of Henry James’ ambiguous classic.

A favorite since 1898, when it materialized in Collier’s Weekly magazine, “Turn of the Screw” has inspired numerous stage and screen versions. This take by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher strips James’ ambivalent tale of a repressed governess who battles two possibly imaginary ghosts for the soul of her charges down to its literary essentials.

Hatcher’s conceit refuses scenery or sound effects, relying instead on two actors and James’ narrative to spark our imaginations, and that’s how Bailey stages it (with ripe assistance from lighting designer Michael Redfield).

As the governess, Lockwood, whose inner contradictions are aptly detectable yet never clearly identifiable, has the right mix of nuance and neuroses.

Elkin meets her beat for ambivalent beat as the story-framing guardian, twittering housekeeper, looming spectral presence and, especially, 10-year-old Miles (Flora, his tongue-tied sister, is mimetically referred to by both).

Modest yet stylish, impressive and often downright creepy, “Turn of the Screw” is a show you’d best not see alone, lest the ride home prove too unnerving for safety.

-- David C. Nichols

“The Turn of the Screw,” Pacific Resident Theatre, 705 1/2 Venice Blvd., 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends. March 12. $18 to $25. (310) 822-8392. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Actors highlight stale ‘Lion’

James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter” is a production of Theatre West’s new Chestnut series, which mandates the revival of “great” plays. Unfortunately, in this case, the series is too aptly named. Produced on Broadway in 1966 and hastily made into a 1968 film starring Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn, “Lion” is a stale and hoary chestnut that hasn’t aged well.

Strip away the one-liners and the plot is revealed in all its paucity. In short, the Christmas festivities at Chinon have degenerated into internecine squabbling among fiery-but-aging monarch Henry II, his estranged wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their three rabidly ambitious sons. Fiery emotionality ebbs and flows. Throughout the hyperhistrionic but essentially empty action, furious quarrels that threaten to topple the kingdom are dismissed with a laugh-getting quip.

Unfortunately, rather than shoring up the skeletal plot, director Mark Travis loads it with more histrionics. In the opening scene, men lope down the aisles like crouching apes as the jungle sounds of Christopher Burns’ ear-splitting sound design reverberate. The year is 1183, but in Travis’ staging, these characters are barely out of the cave, a conceit emphasized in Jeff Rack’s cold stone set and Beth Morgan’s furry costumes. Characters forage for mulled wine out of weird stone kettles, and the bottom half of Henry’s garb looks as if it was borrowed from a Wookiee.

The saving grace of this production can be found in its performances. Jim Beaver is a virile and straightforward Henry, while Adam Conger’s John is an acutely realized weasel ferreting for power, in stark contrast to Yancey Dunham’s robust Richard, whose path to supremacy lies in main force. Kendra Cover, Matt Ritchey and Jason Galloway round out the cast. But it is Bridget Hanley’s Eleanor, larger than life but refreshingly matter-of-fact, who takes the crown among this able company. Swimming against the tide of artifice, Hanley resuscitates the human element of this flawed but formidably acted revival.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“The Lion in Winter,” Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends April 1. $20. (323) 851-7977. www.theatrewest.org. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

Constrained version of Gorky

In “The Shelter,” Russian director Valery Belyakovich brings to the Odyssey Theatre his starkly modernist re-envisioning of “The Lower Depths,” Maxim Gorky’s 1902 drama about a squalid boarding house and its derelict inhabitants. As his cast snakes through dramatic spot lighting and a sparse set of metal-frame bunk beds angled in menacing institutional rows, Belyakovich makes a visually arresting declaration that this is not your grandfather’s Gorky.

To the nagging problem of what to do with its remaining 2 hours and 59 minutes, however, the production offers a less inspired answer.

In attempting to “universalize” Gorky’s portrait of social neglect in the twilight of the Tsarist regime, naturalistic specificity has been replaced with abstraction devoid of color -- literally, in fact, as the 19 characters are clad in grey garb suggesting the inmates of an asylum.

Belyakovich further restricts his performers to a nearly unwavering high-amplitude delivery style that’s democratic to a fault -- when all moments are equally momentous, the result is intensity without consequence. Even the muscular choreography that punctuates the dialogue becomes repetitive and fatiguing.

Within these stylistic constraints, the obviously committed performers struggle valiantly to differentiate their archetypal characters (thief, gambler, prostitute, actor, lawyer, etc.) with unique personalities. But only Pasha D. Lychnikoff (who assisted Lee Hubbard with the English adaptation) as the headstrong libertine seems fully at home with the distinctively East European staging approach. The rest are to varying extent ill-fitting projections of Western conventions, the most jarring being Donald E. Lacy Jr.’s depiction of a philosopher-preacher as a curious fusion of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Telly Savalas.

Given the adaptation’s considerable liberties, retaining so many characters seems like misplaced fidelity since they’re all rehashing the same question: whether to hide behind the comfort of our illusions or face the pain of unshielded truth. What made Gorky’s original play revolutionary was its focus on the dregs of society. But in the wake of Brecht, Odets and O’Neill, it’s enough to appreciate the play’s historical context without dressing it up like Ionesco.

-- Philip Brandes

“The Shelter,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends March 5. $28 to $30. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 3 hours.

Attractive, erotic, yet numbing

A sort of spoken word melange about female sexuality past age 40, “Herotique-aahh ...” at the Fremont Centre Theatre is purportedly the initial part of a trilogy that its producers intend to franchise, a la “The Vagina Monologues” and “Menopause: The Musical.” But unlike its flawed but entertaining predecessors, this attractively packaged erotic bombardment is sometimes more numbing than arousing.

The brainchild of 3 Blacque Chix Production, produced here in association with James and Lissa Reynolds and the California Performing Arts Center, the show’s biggest asset are the three “chix”: Lola Love, Iona Morris and Mariann Aalda, who co-created “Herotique-aahh ...” and are its sole performers.

All post-40, the women look stunning as they slink, dance and cavort about the stage in designer Fontella Boone’s sexy ensembles. Live music, provided by musical director and percussionist Munyungo Jackson and bassist Andre Manga, punctuates James Reynold’s formidably crisp staging.

Unfortunately, attractive though the messengers are, the message doesn’t always measure up to the medium. The three main characters could have been lifted straight out of a soft porn novel. Morris plays Lady I, “The Goddess of Love & Sexual Freedom,” a sultry earth goddess at one with nature; Love is Lady L, “The Dominatrix,” a bisexual fetishist with a mean whip hand; while Aalda is Lady M, “The Ex-Stepford Wife,” a recent divorcee who comes across as a perkily libidinous Mary Tyler Moore.

All have their galvanic moments, particularly Aalda, whose character is the most engaging. Unfortunately, the overly familiar archetypes, however humorously intended, fail to humanize the repetitively erotic content. As Lady Love croons at one point, “Tease me. Freak me. But don’t leave me bored” -- a sentiment heartily echoed by the audience.

-- F.K.F.

“Herotique-aahh ... ,” Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb. 26. $25. (866) 811-4111. www.3BlacqueChix.com. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Polished staging by student actors

In a well-crafted revival of Bernard Pomerance’s “The Elephant Man” at Burbank’s Victory Theatre Center, what began as a showcase scene for director June Chandler’s acting students has evolved into a polished staging with some sharply poignant reflections on alienation and the need for human connection.

Those with elephant memories who associate the historically based story of tragically deformed John Merrick with the 1980 David Lynch film adaptation may not expect this predecessor play’s more abstract (and budget friendly) approach, suggesting Merrick’s deformities through body posture rather than elaborate makeup. Nevertheless, the concept keeps the focus on the civilized soul trapped inside a horrific prison of flesh.

Merrick’s innate decency is sympathetically conveyed by Derick Han, who nurtures the character from a humiliated, tongue-tied circus freak to the toast of Victorian society.

Amid handsome period sets and costumes (an antique musical box provides a haunting recurring theme), Chandler’s staging forcefully drives home the play’s central assertion that Merrick’s celebrity came about because others saw in him a reflection of themselves.

The consequences of this projection are most severe for Merrick’s physician, benefactor and biographer, Frederick Treves. In George Ferra’s portrayal, the initially smug, self-satisfied Treves crumbles in a dream sequence in which he trades places with his patient and recognizes himself as the true monster, embodying the rigid hypocrisies of his time.

The most moving episode is a tender but hopeless romantic exchange between the perky pachyderm and a freethinking actress (Tracy Lynn Jensen). But not all scenes sustain this level of quality in a production that surrounds the three leads with 26 of their classmates, presumably working for peanuts.

-- P.B.

“The Elephant Man,” Victory Theatre Center, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. on Feb. 26. Ends Feb. 26. $20 to $24. (818) 841-5421. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Giving voice to ‘Banned Plays’

Censorship through the years is the impetus for “Banned Plays” at Area 101. This sampler of scenes from historically prohibited titles, researched and performed by GuerilLA Theatre, suggests that anyone with something provocative to say has always been best advised to expect moral indignation.

The brainchild of producer-performer Jennifer Lamar, GuerilLA Theatre began in local living rooms, and similar off-handed amiability surrounds “Banned Plays.” Audience members sample complimentary cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, the cast mingling among them in bathrobes before launching the peek-a-boo opening number from “Oh! Calcutta!”

Done with historical data between scenes, “Banned Plays” takes in some usual suspects (“Salome,” “Ghosts,” “The Boys in the Band,” “A Patriot for Me”) and some curiosities. How often does one encounter Michael McClure’s scabrous “The Beard,” with Billy the Kid (Tim Karasawa) and Jean Harlow (Jodi Bianca Wise) getting foulmouthed and physical in the afterlife? Or Edouard Bourdet’s 1926 lesbian drama, “The Captive,” its cutting here involving tortured Irene (Lamar) and her betrayed Jacques (David Goryl)?

There are other taut performances, notably Kelly Ann Ford, rending as Edna opposite Jerry Weil’s explosive Joe in the “Waiting for Lefty” excerpt. Others in the game ensemble are more indeterminate. For example, Patrick Hancock overplays Herod in “Salome” and underplays Redl in “Patriot,” while Caroline Westheimer lacks the lethal thrust of Christopher Durang’s “Sister Mary Ignatius.” Hardly their fault: snippets out of dramatic context remain snippets. Not without interest, but not exactly shocking, either, “Banned Plays” seems mainly geared toward academics, advocates and drama festival adjudicators.

-- D.C.N.

“Banned Plays,” Area 101, 1051 N. Cole Ave., Stage B, Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays, 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. Ends March 4. Nudity and language; no one under 18 admitted. $25 to $27.50. (323) 850-3240. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.