A cyborg spouse, marital strife

All too recognizable elements of present-day conflicts and social dysfunction are projected onto a post-Orwellian future in “A New World War,” an angry sci-fi comedy by Rita Valencia presented by Padua Playwrights.

With incisive wit, Valencia envisions a totalitarian rule maintained by implanted “identity chips” and “fidelity warrants” in which a restless housewife named Antar (Niamh McCormally) violates her contractual obligations to Gauloise (Jack Littman), the cyborg spouse custom-built to meet her subconscious needs.

The irony, of course, is that uber-consumer Antar (who achieved fleeting fame as the author of “How to Throw an Awesome Party”) is every bit as programmed and mechanical in her thinking as any cyborg. It’s only after she meets Charly (Andy Hopper), a rugged soldier in the underground resistance, that conflicted loyalties (“He’s the enemy -- and he’s hot”) drive Antar to question authority.

In a nicely sinister turn, Gray Palmer’s marriage counselor/ cyborg repairman, named “Mother-in-Law,” tries to lure Antar back to the fold with banal pronouncements (“The sooner the terrorists are put down, the sooner you can go shopping”). Evidently a student of modern history, he believes that when truth threatens the reality built on lies we’ve told ourselves, his mission is to ensure that truth will never be revealed.

Rejected by Antar as a machine incapable of change, Gauloise responds with a well-constructed soliloquy filled with that quintessential human quality, self-loathing.

Don’t expect many shades of gray, however. Guy Zimmerman’s energetic staging tightly adheres to the intended political agitprop masquerading as a relationship story (a distinction explicitly stated at one point). When you’re either a placid robot or a rabid insurgent, there’s little breathing room for nuance.

-- Philip Brandes

“A New World War,” Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre, 5636 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 12. $20. (213) 625-1766. Running time: 1 hours, 25 minutes.

Politics and self-realization

Trust British playwright David Hare to turn a platitude on its head. Where some might celebrate life’s possibilities, the world-weary heroine of Hare’s “The Bay at Nice” declares that “Life is defined by its absence -- by what it can’t be.”

In this spare 1986 one-act, Hare, as usual, uses politics as metaphor -- human fallibility writ large. Fine performances from NoHo’s Andak Stage Company bring out the emotional complexities in this portrait of Valentina (Anne Gee Byrd), a former artist who abandoned her bohemian life in 1920s Paris to return to her native Russia. Thirty years later, Valentina has been summoned to the Hermitage museum to help authenticate a recently acquired painting supposedly by Henri Matisse, with whom she had studied (and perhaps had a love affair).

Soviet-era Russia in the 1950s is the perfect embodiment of failure, and Byrd’s sharp-tongued Valentina is eloquently aware of all she gave up to embrace it. Caustic, bitter and coldly pragmatic, she heaps withering scorn on the ideals of the play’s other three characters. Singled out for particularly vehement disappointment is her daughter, Sophia (Annie LaRussa), who is preparing to flee her relatively comfortable but soulless marriage to a rising party bureaucrat in favor of the much older, downtrodden Peter (John Combs), dismissed by Valentina as “the soul of no hope.”

Nevertheless, LaRussa shows unexpected spunk in mousy Sophia’s determination to achieve a fulfilling self-definition that eluded her mother. An ambitious assistant curator (Charlotte Di Gregorio), who is counting on an authentication to advance her career, completes the trio of supplicants for Valentina’s endorsement and assistance.

Under Anne McNaughton’s well-paced direction, the actors’ tightly focused emotional intensity is well suited to the Andak’s intimate new venue (next door to the former Antaeus space). Nevertheless, Hare’s play remains highly specialized and sometimes arbitrary in its juxtaposition of politics, art and family in a historical context whose relevance to the underlying human truths isn’t always clear or urgent.

-- P.B.

“The Bay at Nice,” New Place Theatre, 10950 Peach Grove St., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 20. $15. (866) 811-4111 or www.andak.org. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

A nod to race, legacy and family

Artists who drowned themselves. The middle passage. Strong tides. Deep water evokes all those associations. But in Roger Guenveur Smith’s new solo show, “Who Killed Bob Marley?,” it also expresses the gulf between dreams and being, as the writer-performer puts it, “an incog-Negro.”

Dressed in black, his feet bare, Smith moves sinuously through the pristine space of the Bootleg, his free-form physical and spoken poetry accompanied by the insistent rhythms of Marc Anthony Thompson’s music. Behind him, video images slide across a large upstage screen: home movies from childhood; an imagined romance between Smith’s alter ego, a suicidal poet, and a beautiful painter; footage from his trips to Jamaica with his father.

Swirling in this sea of memories are vivid stories that capture Smith’s dilemma of self: the young artist, in costume for a show about Frederick Douglass, hilariously running for his life after asking Rastafarians to lower the volume of their music (“Turning down the bass / is like asking a brother / to turn down his race”); an encounter with August Wilson; and Smith’s near-drowning in the waters off Jamaica.

At the core, though, the show reads as a love letter to Smith’s father, a Howard University graduate who became a lawyer and judge, and the real question here is not so much “Who Killed Bob Marley?” but how children can take on the best parts of their parents while remaining true to their own identities.

Some may not respond to Smith’s tripped-out presentation and fragmented storytelling. Parts of the evening verge dangerously on the anecdotal, and the cliched romance Smith concocts doesn’t pay off. But if this artist takes himself rather seriously, he always turns his obsessions around on themselves, ironizing his project of self-actualization even as he pursues it headlong. There’s a consistent wit and complication to his work, and please: This guy’s got charisma to burn.

For anyone who has ever struggled with a legacy -- of race, family, achievement -- “Who Killed Bob Marley?” creates a hypnotic space of reflection, a dream dive toward the better self who seems ever just out of reach.

-- Charlotte Stoudt

“Who Killed Bob Marley?” Bootleg, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Ends April 29. $20. (213) 389-3856. Running time: 70 minutes.

Soldiers, civilians pick up after war

Boston, 1945. In a rooming house run by Imogen (Alyss Henderson) and her young sister-in-law, Sylvia (Amanda Troop, alternating with Kelly Lohman), all the residents -- not the boarders -- are waiting for the rest of their lives to happen. Del, Sylvia’s husband, has been missing for three years. Meanwhile, sardonic Francophile Mr. John (James Calvert, alternating with Alan Brooks) has been teaching Sylvia the correct declension of aimer -- to love -- and she’s proving a more apt pupil than he realizes.

Real coffee may have just reappeared on the grocery shelves, but the effect of the war on those who went away and on those who stayed home is far from over. What happens to emotions rationed for too long when a chance at happiness -- however complicated -- walks through the door?

Interact Theatre Company’s graceful and affecting production of Ann Noble’s “The Boarding House” offers the underrated, old-fashioned pleasure of sitting back in your seat and wondering what will happen next. From Darin Anthony’s nuanced direction to Sherry Linnell’s fetching costumes, everything about this show has an easy assurance that draws you into the story.

On Joel Daavid’s evocative living-room set -- even the water stains on the walls speak volumes -- a winning cast plays out a bittersweet game of hearts. As an adorable bungler masking a hidden agenda, Matt Crabtree walks off with every scene he’s in; and the fine Henderson mines every bit of brittle strength and fear from what could have been a far less memorable role.

If “Boarding House” doesn’t go anywhere unexpected -- Noble’s reassuring script feels like a sturdy studio pic written 60 years ago for a young Anne Baxter -- that reliability should be counted among its charms. The play doesn’t push any envelopes, but it delivers.

-- C.S.

“The Boarding House,” Write Act Repertory Theatre, St. Stephen’s Church, 6128 Yucca St., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays. Ends June 2. $20. (818) 765-8732. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Happy and gay, and quite amusing

Don a tinsel boa, open your mind and leave preconceptions behind at “Beyond the Beyond: The Gay FutureWorld!,” which prances about the Davidson/Valentini Theatre through Sunday. This giddy Cornerstone Theatre Company collaboration with the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center turns the quirks of community-outreach performance into a delightfully unpretentious blast.

Developed through workshops with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth and seniors, “Beyond the Beyond” begins outside in the Ed Gould Village plaza.

Our astral emcee (founding Cornerstone member Peter Howard) dispenses wry preflight instructions while players in pink hospital scrubs drape Christmas tree garlands around our shoulders as “seat belts.”

Inside, set and puppet designer Lynn Jeffries’ decor festoons a space-age control deck with more holiday remnants to grinning garage-theater effect. A sweetly irreverent view of future gay life proceeds from century to century, aided by resourceful designers Kerry Farmer (lights) and Benajah Cobb (sound) and propelled by the wholly endearing cast.

Under director Paul Zaloom’s winking eye, this representative blend of GLBT civilians and professional artists charms us from the fluttering-hands takeoff to the final reworded chorus of “Amazing Grace.” Wearing ever-wittier costumes by Elizabeth A. Cox and Garry Lennon, they share personal stories, satirical upcoming landmarks and the “Smithsonian Museum of Fabulous Homosexual Moments” (or “SoMoHomoMoMos”) with the engaged spontaneity of children.

Their script, co-written with Zaloom and Jeffries, is hardly deep dish, but it certainly serves its proactive purpose. The odd blown line or cornball joke heightens the appealing ambience of a loopy PTA pageant overseen by Armistead Maupin. Yes, the shadow puppet retelling of “Snow White” rambles on, and nonprofessional vagaries are endemic to the communal process. Yet that is precisely how “Beyond the Beyond” lands its hopeful, hilarious vision of a gayer, happier tomorrow.

-- David C. Nichols

“Beyond the Beyond: The Gay FutureWorld!,” L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, Davidson/Valentini Theatre, 1125 N. McCadden Place, L.A. 8 p.m. today and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday. Ends Sunday. $15 and $20. (323) 860-7300 or www.lagaycenter.org/boxoffice. Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes.