Foote’s Texas universe

There’s something gracious and pure about the emotional directness of Horton Foote’s dramas. The playwright, still going strong in his early 90s, writes with admirable simplicity about complicated things such as moral ambivalence and conflicting desires. His compassionate lucidity is on display in “Harrison, Texas,” a bill of one-acts named after the fictional town he has made his permanent literary address.

This 2nd Story Theater offering, directed by Scott Paulin at the Lost Studio Theatre, consists of “The Midnight Caller,” “Blind Date” and “The One-Armed Man.” The production isn’t the smoothest, and it probably won’t change the minds of those who consider Foote old-fashioned. But there are moments when the author’s tender vision for his flawed characters authentically comes across.

When an unmarried gentleman (John Pirruccello) comes to live in an all-female boardinghouse in “The Midnight Caller,” quotidian equilibrium is thrown topsy-turvy. Making matters more turbulent is the arrival of Helen (Elizabeth Carlson), a beautiful young woman who has left her alcoholic husband. To her nightly humiliation, this haunted man sorrowfully calls out to her after loading up on drink. These outbursts are disturbing the residents, especially the high-strung one who’s ticked off that the new male boarder seems obsessed with Helen too.

The wonderfully homespun set by Jeff Whitman isn’t matched by a logistical finesse in the staging. Carlson is barely audible at times, and the supposed howling of her ex-husband (Alan Savanapridi) wouldn’t wake a guard dog. It’s as though these two actors are performing for some invisible camera. Far more vivid is Wendy Phillips as an older spinster who finds beauty in lightning bugs and relief in the cool of autumn.

The highlight of “Blind Date” is Laura Richardson’s appropriately scenery-chewing turn as Dolores, an aging beauty queen who’s determined to set up her unruly niece (Sarah Schaub, acting as though she’s on “Mama’s Family”). More subdued though equally noteworthy is John Bozeman as Dolores’ stoical but still devoted husband. Foote tells more about a marriage in a few suggestive silences than most dramatists can do in pages of dialogue.

“The One-Armed Man” erupts in shocking violence. The manager of a cotton gin (John Blevins) is accosted by a former employee (Savanapridi, too quiet again), who lost his arm on the job. And as usual in Foote’s somberly humane universe, those who do wrong seem almost as pitiful as their not entirely innocent victims.

-- Charles McNulty

“Harrison, Texas,” Lost Studio Theatre, 130 S. La Brea Ave., L.A. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb. 17. $20. (800) 595-4849. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

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Dark secrets in ‘Spatter Pattern’

Adjacent apartments become parallel hells for two men haunted by death in Neal Bell’s edgy noir-ish thriller “Spatter Pattern (Or, How I Got Away with It).”

Bell’s script skillfully adapts the conventions of the suspense genre to explorations of identity, grief and isolation.

The story finds screenwriter Dunn (Jim Hanna) in a downward spiral -- his gay partner of more than 20 years has recently died, his agent has dropped him, and in a desperate search for a fresh start he rents a dingy unit in a seedy part of town.

Dunn discovers a potential gold mine of a storyline on the other side of his living room wall. His neighbor turns out to be a tabloid celebrity -- college professor Tate (Donald Robert Stewart), suspected of murdering one of his students. Though the police lack sufficient evidence to charge him with the crime, the taint of suspicion has already cost Tate his job, marriage and home.

Despite a few too many echoes of the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink,” Bell takes the premise in a different direction as Dunn cultivates a friendship with Tate in pursuit of screenplay fodder but finds more of a psychic bond than he anticipated. In trying to unravel the question of Tate’s guilt, Dunn slides into a surreal reality that includes conversations with the victim (Lindsay Lauren Wray), who holds the key to Tate’s dark secret. In multiple roles, Leslie Gilliam, Peter Ross Stephens and Jake Elsas supply a variety of capably differentiated characters.

Limited production resources prevent Derek Charles Livingston’s staging from fully realizing the atmospheric environment the material warrants, but the lead performers carry the evening.

Guilty or innocent, Stewart’s Tate is a charismatic but dangerously unstable mess, providing ample plot-driving suspense through the tight first half. As the increasingly convoluted metaphysics pile up, however, coherence suffers past the point of intriguing ambiguity.

It remains for Hanna to anchor the piece in Dunn’s struggle with the memory of his dead love. For all its trappings of intrigue, the piece is most compelling in its portrait of simple grief and loss.

-- Philip Brandes

“Spatter Pattern,” Ark Theatre Company, 1647 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb. 23. $20-$22. (323) 969-1707 or www.arktheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

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Intimate setting works for ‘Wit’

In 1999, a previously unpublished kindergarten teacher won the Pulitzer Prize for a play about a John Donne scholar dying of cancer. Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” now receiving a satisfyingly intimate production at the Chandler Studio Theatre, turned the cliches of the terminal disease plotline into a bracing exploration of how the self confronts its end.

Diagnosed with stage four metastatic ovarian cancer -- “There is no stage five,” she observes dryly -- Dr. Vivian Bearing (Karesa McElheny) marshals her prodigious intelligence, taking on her illness and its excruciatingly painful treatment like an advanced seminar in textual analysis. She believes that like everything else in life, disease can be managed with rigor and a keen sense of irony, and “Wit” is her wrenching re-education. Set and lighting designer August Viverito’s shiny white walls ingeniously double as an antiseptic hospital room and a writing surface for Vivian; she furiously scrawls academic and medical terminology on the wall as if spelling the words correctly will scare off her cancer.

Director Robert Mammana draws a compelling performance from the regal McElheny, who vividly conveys Vivian’s pleasure in minds (Donne’s, her own, even her intimidated students’) and her increasing awareness of how illness annihilates subtlety, paradox and esprit. If the supporting cast tends toward the uneven, we never lose our connection to Vivian herself; the Studio’s small confines work well for the play, with McElheny making the most of her proximity to the audience.

Edson’s spare, compassionate look at the infinitely imaginative soul confronting the limits of the body may have been performed around the world and back, but it retains a quietly devastating power. Vivian, like all of us, longs for ballast against mortality. But poetry, religion, science -- study what we will, there’s no guide to the undiscovered country.

-- Charlotte Stoudt

“Wit,” the Chandler Studio Theatre Center, 12443 Chandler Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb 16. $22. (800) 838-3006 or www.theprodco.com. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

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A full but shaky ‘Monty

“Let It Go,” the unfettered finale of “The Full Monty,” is a surefire capper to a populist show that is capable of creating audience frenzy. Crowds go wild at the sight of ordinary people in Chippendale’s mode (the title refers to full frontal nudity). Cracked prurience has buoyed David Yazbek and Terrence McNally’s 2000 musical since its San Diego premiere. It does so once more in the intimate take at Theatre/Theater, provided one is already a die-hard fan. Nondevotees may be less enraptured.

Based on the smash British film about a group of out-of-work steelworkers turned strippers, “The Full Monty” is essentially unassuming pop entertainment. Yazbek’s spiky, jazz-inflected score is infectious, the ballads well-considered and the lyrics often tickling. Librettist McNally shrewdly Americanizes the plot, especially its central thread about a divorced loser (Sheldon Morley) angling to retain his son (Mitchell Hart), in a mix of sentiment and lowbrow humor.

Yet what may read agreeably raunchy and touching from a proscenium’s distance curiously risks overkill at close range. Director Kristie Rutledge has some bright staging ideas; she also permits a self-delighted aura that thwarts spontaneity. Lauren Blair’s choreography is adequate but over-studied, missing the effect of awkward males who loosen up by degrees, which defeats the point.

The casting is extremely variable. As hero Jerry, Morley is a wonderful singer, but his brawny physicality renders the seriocomic function of Ed McBride’s full-figured Dave almost moot. Richard Van Slyke and Ellen Caranasos as the social-dancing materialists and Aileen-Marie Scott as Dave’s frustrated wife are nearer the mark. Timothy Hearl’s suicidal mother’s boy, Ben Euphrat’s well-endowed daredevil and Keith E. Wright’s cliche-defying African American are quirkily capable; as seen-it-all accompanist Jeanette, Suzan Solomon overplays wildly. Alas, so does this earnestly predigested effort, though aficionados will erupt nonetheless.

-- David C. Nichols

“The Full Monty,” Theatre/Theater, 5041 W. Pico Blvd., L.A. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb. 3. $ 20. (310) 287-1825. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

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Investigating Gurney’s ‘demise’

“Who murdered the playwright A.R. Gurney?” is a question that for some reason seems to preoccupy the playwright A.R. Gurney throughout his recent politically themed comedy, “Post Mortem.”

Gurney, of course, is very much alive, and the play’s conceit of a futuristic investigation into his mysterious “demise” treads a precarious line between cleverness and self-indulgence -- both of which are evident in a newly revised, hit-and-miss version presented by Insight America.

In a totalitarian right-wing theocracy spawned by the Bush-Cheney administration, a lone voice of dissent turns out to be the subversive dramatist Gurney himself. A lost manuscript of his banned final play (which may have been the reason for his suspected assassination) is unearthed by Dexter (Alan Bruce Becker), an enterprising graduate student in search of a thesis topic that will win the heart of his indifferent instructor, Alice (Anna Nicholas). Together, they explore the author’s death and plot a guerrilla staging of a play so potent it will unleash a revolution.

More wishful thinking: It turns out that in addition to being a fulcrum of social upheaval, Gurney’s play is something of an aphrodisiac -- Alice and Dexter are married by the second scene, a fast-forward of several years to their celebrity lecture/interview about love and politics, conducted by a charmingly ditzy student (Andrea Syglowski).

On the plus side, Gurney undercuts self-importance with self-deprecating wit -- particularly with respect to his status as a “minor author of middle-class comedies of manners” -- and some of his shots at present-day politics of intimidation and spin are deft and accurate, limited shelf life notwithstanding.

Nevertheless, director Jered Barclay and his cast have trouble breathing life into the cerebral dialogue and finding appropriate emotional beats. Ironically, for all its sentimentality, Gurney’s earlier “Love Letters” captured more authentic connection in the correspondence between two kindred souls kept apart by circumstance than “Post Mortem” shows in a couple who get together. One of their thrown-away lines rings truer than their philosophical debate: It all boils down to love, ultimately.

-- P.B.

“Post Mortem,” Lyric Hyperion Theatre Cafe, 2106 Hyperion Ave., Silver Lake. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb. 17. $20. (800) 595-4849 or www.tix.com. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.