STAGE BEAT

Trading partners in ‘Sex’

“Wouldn’t it be nice if sex actually helped more marriages than it hurt?” With that benign observation, “It’s Just Sex” lands its unapologetically commercial précis. Writer-director Jeff Gould’s revision of his 2002 parable about trading spouses is hardly earthshaking, but it steers genre conventions into edgier terrain with unexpected insight.

True, the setup is as formulaic as designer Gary Guidinger’s living room setting, opening with a couple in the first throes of afternoon delight. In comes another woman, who stares aghast at her husband and his hooker. After they’re alone, Joan (Forbes Riley) and Phil (Mark Durbin) seem primed for a marital battle royal. Except that they’re having company tonight, and Phil’s infidelity is tucked away, for now.

First, we must meet the guests. Free-spirited Carl (Scott Connell) and nubile Kelly (Janelle Giumarra) cannot keep their hands off each other. Aggressive Lisa (Suzan Brittan) and geeky Greg (Bryan T. Donovan) have potency issues. After they arrive, slow-burning Joan proposes a drinking game, and as Act 1 closes everyone has changed partners.

Act 2 reverses assumptions with unusual content for a boulevard farce. Gould has a weakness for jargon, and his characters almost fall into archetype. But there’s also well-observed bite to the packed pauses and wry zingers, and the fine-tuned cast, which varies nightly, scores a comic home run.

Riley’s gimlet-eyed Joan and Connell’s laid-back Carl are the extremes between which their colleagues amble, and Donovan’s disheveled re-entrance after the swap speaks hysterical volumes. Alternate cast members include real-life couple Carolyn Hennesy and Donald Agnelli, “Melrose Place” veteran Thomas Calabro and author Gould. “It’s Just Sex” is no miracle, but its thoughtful naughtiness rocks the house.

-- David C. Nichols

“It’s Just Sex,” Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., L.A. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Sept. 23. Adult audiences. $30. (323) 960-7721 or www .Plays411.com/justsex. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

‘San Diego’: Not quite at altitude

A distinctive sensibility fuels the experimental works of Scottish playwright David Greig. It’s certainly on tap in “San Diego.” Greig’s prismatic 2003 reverie on American dislocation receives its U.S. premiere at the Rude Guerrilla Theatre Company.

Inspired by Greig’s first trip to the United States, “San Diego” begins with an authorial stand-in (Keith Bennett, arresting as ever) on a British Airways flight. Greig plunges him into calamity after disembarking, which lets Greig and his proxy ascend above a subconscious narrative that crisscrosses itself like so many flying geese.

Greig’s assailant, a Nigerian from London, seeks his mother, allegedly a backup singer for Wings, enlisting two indigents in his quest. The British Airways pilot cannot locate his layover hotel for the call girl he’s hired. His actor son plays a pilot in a cheesy disaster flick. His institutionalized daughter redefines “sins of the flesh,” while his daughter-in-law considers a convent. Those are just the clearly perceptible scenarios.

Placing us on either side of the map that centers his striking set design, director Dave Barton stages Greig’s symbolist musings with determination, and his fearless players bare their marrow. As pilot and son, David Cramer and Ryan Harris expertly merge arch and heartfelt energies. Melita Ann Sager and Robert Dean Nunez make an eerily committed self-mutilator and asylum seeker. Amanda Salas’ unlikely nun, Chrisgen Whitfield’s stowaway and the sacred fools of Thomas Helsper and Rick Kopps are other standouts in a full-throttle troupe.

Yet, for all its poetic heft, Greig’s nonlinear text proves less than dramatically pliable. Conceptual similes that impress in print flirt with stasis on stage, despite their facility. The Pirandello motifs are scantly developed, and the many location shifts tax forward propulsion. An admirably ambitious effort, finally “San Diego” is sans point.

-- D.C.N.

“San Diego,” Empire Theater, 202 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Also, 8 p.m. Sept. 19. Ends Sept. 21. Adult audiences. $20. (714) 547-4688. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Comic collision of pirates, ninjas

What happens when you mix Bacardi and sake? Chances are you get something as randomly silly as “Pirates & Ninjas: An Extravagant Adventure.” This hybrid parody brings together two genres that have no logical reason for coexisting in the theater world, or the real one for that matter. Constructed almost entirely out of comic non sequiturs, “Pirates & Ninjas” generates frequent laughter even if it seldom surpasses the level of a college comedy troupe.

The show is divided into three mini-plays of varying quality. The first section, written by Maria DeLuca, is a forgettable tale of a pirate captain’s journey to the New World, complete with ninja attacks on the high seas. The marginally better second section, by Eva Anderson, uses the “Choose Your Own Adventure” template to tell the story of a modern-day couch potato’s run-in with ninjas. In the climax, our hero emerges victorious by simply “choosing” to make lunch instead of facing his sword-wielding adversaries.

“Pirates & Ninjas” saves its best material for last. The final section, written by Lissa Sherman, concerns two adjacent apartments, one inhabited by a pirate, the other by a ninja. As you might expect, the former’s pad is a cluttered mess of bottles and booty, and the latter adheres to Zen minimalist décor. Unaware of the other’s existence, the protagonists experience solitude and then despair, until they are improbably united by simultaneous suicide attempts. Humanistic and even hilarious, this playlet is an elegant fable about cross-cultural empathy.

The cast is endearingly game for just about anything. As the lonely pirate of the third section, Daniel Gallai deserves special mention for his sensitive and comically fine-tuned performance -- and for putting just the right amount of phlegm into his guttural “Arrrrghs.”

-- David Ng

“Pirates & Ninjas: An Extravagant Adventure,” Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Ends Sept. 22. $10. (866) 219-4944 or www.enterthebluehouse.com. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

‘Uncle Vanya’: The musical

Chekhov done well is as good as live theater gets, but anything less is usually excruciating. Given the exacting demands of the playwright’s character-driven style, there isn’t much middle ground. Or so I had always believed, until the Spotlight Theatre company opened up a whole new dimension of bewilderment with its musical adaptation, “A Song for Vanya.”

The premise for this ill-conceived effort to transform “Uncle Vanya” into a song cycle is spectacularly incongruous. Notwithstanding precedents of musicals based on classic literature (director Hal Friedman’s program notes cite “Pygmalion” and “Les Miserables”), successful adaptation usually starts with an engaging story. It’s hard to imagine a less exciting narrative arc than “Vanya’s” static portrait of dead-end lives steeped in boredom and disillusionment, where the climactic act is the recitation of a shopping list.

To their credit, creators Robin Eschner, Bret Martin and John Shillington seek musical representations of Chekhov’s complex characters without dumbing them down. While some of the faux-operatic numbers play like warmed-over Andrew Lloyd Weber, at its best the score weaves a rich tapestry of overlapping voices caught in a web of unattainable longings.

For all its admirable intentions, however, the musical conceit diminishes its source. A master of understatement, Chekhov challenges actors to find ways to communicate the buried truths that the characters are unable to speak, or at times even recognize. Allowing the performers to openly declare those truths in song strips away that unique tension; here, the characters expose their histories and desires with jarring self-awareness (think Chekhov meets “A Chorus Line”).

Furthermore, the musical format’s mannered poses and delivery spill into the dialogue retained from the original text, precluding the nuanced naturalism that makes “Uncle Vanya” so powerful.

The show’s eight earnest actors include only one professional-caliber singer (Kate O’Malley Jeffrey as spinster Sonya). Friedman’s staging further erodes the subtext by incorporating an octet of interpretive dancers to mirror each of the speaking characters and unleash their bottled-up passions. Sometimes there’s a lot to be said for repression.

-- Philip Brandes

“A Song for Vanya,” Theatre/Theater, 5041 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 6. $18 ($15 in advance). (661) 634-0692 or www.spotlighttheatre andcafe.com. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Too much talk, not enough action

All politics may be local, but representing social revolutions “one person at a time” -- the stated mission of Kyle T. Wilson’s “Walking Into Traffic” -- entails a precarious balancing act between the personal and the universal.

In its debut production from Hollywood’s Unknown Theater, Wilson’s biting comedy teeters between facile social criticism and gratuitously eccentric characters. The plot involves a budding protest movement sparked when morning drive-time radio personality Sophie Snyder (Shelby Janes) snaps under the futility of reporting relentlessly bad news. In mid-broadcast, she breaks down in tears, dashes out of the studio and begins accosting motorists on a Hollywood Freeway onramp.

Her passionate entreaties for change, spun by the media as deluded ravings, find a sympathetic audience of one in Bart (Ed Dyer), a shy 40-year-old still living with his caustic, hypercritical mother (Goretida Silva).

Sophie finds another disciple in cynical but street-savvy teenager Rock (Joe Nicchi), and the trio embark on a whirlwind crusade against cartoon opponents representing the media, medical establishment, retailers and sinister Homeland Security agents (Sasha Harris, Todd Gallahan, Kyle Ingleman and Craig Johnson supply multiple roles).

As in past Unknown Theatre productions of lesser-known works by Harold Pinter, J.B. Priestly and Albert Camus, performances are accomplished, and director-designer Chris Covics’ staging is lively and inventive. Unfortunately, Wilson’s script offers less to work with -- it’s little more than an extended sketch that consistently settles for intellectual laziness. A laundry list of social problems -- pollution, apathy, civil liberties -- are dutifully rattled off as fodder for protest without any attempt to explore them. Even the newscaster-run-amok premise of Sophie’s rebellion is telegraphed with a plot summary reference to Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network.”

On the personal side, the quirky characters remain relentlessly generic. We learn that Bart keeps falling asleep at his company job, but nothing about what he does. This colorless lack of specificity limits the performers, but they find a saving grace in the play’s ultimate tone of compassion and kindness -- a welcome message that deserves a better medium.

-- P.B.

“Walking Into Traffic,” Unknown Theater, 1110 N. Seward St., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 13. $24 ($18 online). (323) 466-7781 or www.unknown theater.com. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.