Movies’ way with cultural identity

Hotblooded “exotics,” unwashed peasants and brutes. Roles shaped by myth and stereotype were the lot of actors of Spanish-speaking heritage in silent films and early talkies.

That message fuels About Productions’ “They Shoot Mexicans, Don’t They?,” a fragmented but soulful exploration of early cinema’s impact on Mexican identity, at the Autry National Center.

Written by Theresa Chavez, who directs, and Rose Portillo, in collaboration with choreographer Francisco Martinez, filmmakers Jude and Isaac Artenstein and composer Quetzal Flores, the play centers on a conflicted historian analyzing her own family history through Hollywood’s co-opting lens.

In a series of sketchy scenes set in the past -- interwoven with vintage and invented film projections, music and graceful interludes with dancers Michele Bachar and Veronica Caudillo -- a dance school maestra fights to preserve the traditions of the first Californios.

Her nephew yearns to build on the past to realize new creative visions, and his sister dreams of Dolores Del Rio-style film stardom while playing demeaning extra roles in churned-out “greaser” films.

Meanwhile, a 1920s Hollywood producer stumbles into cultural confusion in his attempt to film “The Mission Play,” California’s early 20th century stage phenomenon purporting to dramatize the settlement of the Southwest and the civilizing of its first inhabitants.

In the end, however, the heart of the play’s message beats less in its quick-change roles, shared capably by actors Portillo and Michael Manuel, than in Flores’ Orquesta California and luminous vocalist Martha Gonzalez’s impassioned vocals.

-- Lynne Heffley

“They Shoot Mexicans, Don’t They?,” Autry National Center, Wells Fargo Theatre, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles. 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; ends Oct. 1. (323) 667-2000, Ext. 353. www.autrynationalcenter.org. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

A Greek king at odds with a god

As fascinating as it is flawed, Charles L. Mee’s adaptation of “The Bacchae,” the second offering in City Garage’s “Three by Mee” season, updates Euripides’ tragic tale about a Theban king whose stringent propriety puts him at odds with the god Dionysus. Thanks to Frederique Michel’s insightful staging, the play retains its requisite sense of mystery and menace. But the intellectual sweep of Mee’s hyper-poetical text is often interrupted by surreally puerile chatter that makes us feel as if we are trapped on a phone-sex line in limbo.

Michel’s languorous staging is a departure from her typically metronomic pacing but is fitting for these bare-breasted bacchantes, whose wild carousing has badly rattled Pentheus (impressively measured Troy Dunn), the kingdom’s repressed ruler. In Charles Duncombe’s superb production design, the action opens on a drifting vessel filled with drowsing women resting between their revels. Live music punctuates the proceedings, while shrieking gulls, creaking timbers and lowering light eerily presage the disaster.

Michel effectively plays up the homoerotic frisson between Pentheus and Dionysus (Justin Davanzo), a stranger whom Pentheus does not recognize as a wandering god. Pentheus is intent upon returning the errant females, including his mother, Agave (Joan Chodorow), to hearth and home. Capricious Dionysus’ main interest is pulling the wings off these human flies and watching them wriggle.

Mee brilliantly illustrates the cataclysmic imbalance that results when a male-dominated society marginalizes its women and, conversely, the tragedy that can follow when women become warlike aggressors. But Mee’s leering concupiscence robs the tragedy of much of its sacramental magic. And the fact that Agave’s bloody deed is murder -- even though she does not recognize the victim as her own son -- is simply confusing, especially considering her subsequent protestations that she has killed a wild animal instead of a person.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“The Bacchae,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St. (alley), Santa Monica. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 5:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 22. $20. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Doing battle with the topic of war

Spanning five generations of interconnected lives, “Arlington” at Silver Lake’s Company of Angels attempts to trace America’s conflicted history of warfare in the last century through an ambitious but overreaching quintet of self-contained period playlets.

Evidently intending to engage us close to home at the outset, playwright Garry Michael White has arranged his pieces in reverse chronology. The opener features Tony Gatto and Scott Renfro in a muddled post-Sept. 11 psychodrama about an apparently insecure therapist and his patient, a cop traumatized by the war on terrorism, who exchange roles and ultimately identities.

Following the cop’s roots back to the early ‘70s, the second scene offers a somewhat stereotyped perspective on the divisive climate surrounding the Vietnam War, as a recently returned veteran (Colter Allison) arrives at a Northern California hippie commune to bring his draft-dodging brother (Grayson Berry) home for military service. Predictable conflict ensues.

Perhaps benefiting from greater detachment, White’s scripting generally proves more artful and accomplished the further removed it gets from events in his own lifetime. The third segment, set in 1953, is one of the highlights, also owing much to Tricia Allen’s superb turn as the mother of the second scene’s dueling brothers, grieving and coping with the death of her husband, killed at Inchon.

The fourth scene is a World War II-era coffee shop encounter between a wounded soldier (Berry) and a troubled USO performer (Sarah Zoe Canner) who, in an overwrought effort to shoehorn in historical showbiz biography, turns out to be Judy Garland.

The longer -- and by far the most successful -- concluding segment presents a slice-of-life snapshot of heartland America at the outbreak of World War I. Fine ensemble performances propel this tale of a farming family and the slow-witted drifter (Allison) they hire amid a changing world of shortwave radio and long-distance global conflict.

While “Arlington” improves as it goes along, neither White’s script nor the staging by Curtis Krick and Sean Dillon adequately explores the full complexities of war.

-- Philip Brandes

“Arlington,” Company of Angels, 2106 Hyperion Ave., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends Sept. 30. $18. (323) 883-1717 or www.companyofangels.org. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

A scramble of politics and war

Perpetual winter hangs with ponderous symbolism over a New Hampshire town in “A Year Without Spring,” writer-director Andy Mitton’s meditation on the quiet domestic casualties of life during wartime.

Specifically, Sight Unseen Theatre Group’s guest production at the Odyssey Theatre focuses on the impossibility of maintaining a normal life amid the mind-numbing array of problems that intrude from the world at large.

As an unseasonable June snowfall blankets the town, a young woman named Razi (Mariah Sussman) clings to isolated sanctuary within her spectacularly untidy home (the piles of clothes alone are big enough to hide in). Razi has romantic designs on the electric company guy who periodically drops by to shut off her power for unpaid bills. Though she’s expecting him late in the afternoon, she’s still sleeping when he arrives. For his part, Lionel (Robert Youngs) quickly realizes from her contradictory stories that Razi is a wacko and a compulsive liar, so naturally he agrees to drop by after work for a date. Coherent character motivation isn’t the play’s strong suit, to put it mildly.

Between Lionel’s visits, Razi has to contend with the sudden arrival of Cody (Eric Bloom), an unstable AWOL Marine with stalker tendencies. Razi once dated Cody in middle school, “before he got weird,” but still shares a psychic kinship with him. Her twin tasks are to clear the way for Lionel’s visit and hide Cody from the intimidating, relentless policeman (Michael Laurino) obsessed with his capture.

The performers manage capable enough delivery of quirky dialogue that scrambles politics, war and mundane trivia. They never succeed in making these characters likable, however, and Mitton’s murky, backlit staging does his cast no favors.

Nor does it keep metaphor and realism from a frequent collision course in this cautionary winter’s tale about wartime acquiescence and the surrender of moral principles. At one point Lionel, the capitulator in chief, claims to identify with the groundhog who “stuck his head out, saw the state of things, then went back in his hole and blew his brains out.” Save a bullet for me, please.

-- P.B.

“A Year Without Spring,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 8. $20. (877) 986-7336 or www.sightunseentheatre.com. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.