STAGE REVIEWS : PADUA HILLS ARE ALIVE--BUT BARELY

The Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop began nine years ago in a hauntingly beautiful and moody setting at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, and over the past few years has had to scramble for hospitable locales, from CalArts in Valencia to a site in the Malibu hills to its current venue at Loyola Marymount University.

It may be that these shifts in locations have created a certain artistic defensiveness in a group that started out to explore the modern aesthetic in a wide open western surrounding and discovered that its ideas weren’t taking hold with audiences who didn’t want to sit still for unending portraits of blank dispiritedness or feeble attempts at myth-making. Or maybe its aesthetic was limited to begin with.

In any case, the workshop is played out. With the exception of a few moments in John Steppling’s “Pledging My Love,” it looks almost as if everyone is writing everyone else’s plays, or else directing them by pounding them into passive obedience.

There’s a gripping paralytic deadliness that settles over virtually all of the plays like a dust that gets in your teeth. Or, to put it another way, if experiment entails a variety of topics, themes, colors, rhythms, moods, characters, angles of approach, and a festival or workshop’s health is determined by how much of that variety it can accommodate while sending an audience off with an appreciation of the infinite variables in human experience, then the Padua Workshop is unhealthy.

Causality? Humor? Passion? Relevance (that is, of the kind we see in “Asinamali,” whose actors literally have all had to flee for their lives)? Imaginative grasp of character? Motive? Intellect? The revealing as opposed to the arbitrary juxtaposition? The ineffable sense of completeness you get when you’ve finished with a work, or it’s finished with you? If some or all of these things are what you look for when you go to the theater, forget about Padua.

The workshop schedule is divided into two evenings. “A,” consists of Maria Irene Fornes’ “The Mothers”; Martin Epstein’s “How Gertrude Stormed the Philosopher’s Club,” and Murray Mednick’s “Zohar.”

Mednick’s play makes skillful use of a plasticene and stainless-steel encasement of a talking head on a wall to comment on and participate in the unspoken consciousness of a character named Mendel. Mendel is a writer, dutifully attended by Masha, who brings him his modern version of a chamber pot, and visited by Manya and Label, whose banality reinforces his own. There’s a lot of technique in this play where the technology of communication doesn’t do anything to displace an individual’s self-pity and paranoia. But who can feel for an intellectually limited character who starts out at the bottom of himself and stays there?

Epstein’s play represents the workshop’s only real stab at comedy (it was done earlier this year at the Humana Festival in Louisville), but abandons its early and very funny deliberations on responsibility and fate (two philosophers shoot a waiter at their club and argue about who’ll take the blame) in order to take up much more implausible positions in regard to the girl from the local softball team who has invaded their midst--at which point they become simply fools.

Epstein doesn’t jump into the philosophical fray the way Tom Stoppard might, and the wispy coherency of “Gertrude” is torn by what appears to be arbitrary jumps in focus. It’s a very difficult play to perform, however, and the level of acting, as is true of most of the festival, ranges from the mediocre to the senseless. That doesn’t help the program either.

“The Mothers” is just that--women who have to deal with impossible men and recalcitrant daughters, and can never quite make sense of either (your reviewer was 15 minutes late for this one). Fornes is noted for her technical precision, but these characters, locked in violence and recrimination, are as opaque as stone. This is a play about a group of people who might be street people seen indoors, but it has no point of view. All that was pathetic by way of randomness and inexplicable premature bitterness in that noble decade, the ‘60s, seems to reside in these folks.

“B” night consists of Marlane G. Meyer’s “Kingfish,” a play about an unhappy man and his semi-abstract tyrannical dog, and the people who threaten him; Julie Hebert’s “True Beauties,” another skin-deep look at women in a family redeemed somewhat by shifts in time; John O’Keefe’s “The Magician,” a performer whose cards bear the emblems of his unhappy life, and Steppling’s “Pledging My Love.”

All of these plays are undeveloped, but Steppling’s work, though punctuated by those blackouts that were once a Steppling device but are now a manner (can’t he write scenes?), gets a knife under the flakes of the Hollywood scene in a way you’re not likely to see anywhere else.

The setting is a poolside party in a house that could be anywhere in the Hollywood Hills, and the play deals in an uncannily well-recorded way with those marginally attractive, dim, sleazy figures on the hustle for something they can’t define. It’s an unfinished work, but it’s potentially a modern equivalent to “The Day of the Locust,” and it’s the only play in this roster that gives us the impression of characters observed.

The programs alternate Thursdays through Sunday nights starting at 7 p.m. (with a dinner break) at Loyola Boulevard at West 80th St., (213) 642-2841, through Aug. 17.