Mapa’s ‘Pointless’ Love Life

By naming his latest solo show “Pointless,” Alec Mapa immediately lowers expectations. This strategy continues as soon as the show starts. “Life hasn’t been that interesting lately,” Mapa offers, tentatively.

So why have we gathered at East West Players’ David Henry Hwang Theater to listen to more than an hour of Mapa’s autobiographical ramblings?

Because Mapa is a funny guy with a distinctive stage presence. His last solo, “I Remember Mapa,” and a couple of award-winning performances in plays made that clear and created the expectations that Mapa initially tries to deflate.

Maybe it’s his squarish features, including a mouth that appears to swallow half his face when he drops his jaw in mock shock. Or the feline grace with which he moves his diminutive frame. Or the irrepressible gleam in his eye. Whatever, Mapa easily commands a stage, and he effortlessly conveys the sense that we’ve just gotta hear the latest dispatches from his love life, pointless though they may be.

Mapa’s affairs of the heart haven’t been going well, he tells us. And like many stand-up comics before him, he knows that audiences love to commiserate with tales of romantic woe, if they’re told with a sense of humor.

After reenacting seeing “Love! Valour! Compassion!” from a New York balcony, he says he wants his long-anticipated long-term relationship to be like the one in that play in which two men trimmed each other’s ear hair, after years of being together.

Mapa’s days as a “B-list concubine” for a nameless star of action films didn’t meet that exacting standard. He then spent three years with a New Yorker who seemed right, but Mapa acknowledges that eventually his own performing schedule wrecked that relationship. A more recent fling with a San Franciscan was derailed last summer when the lover chose someone else. Mapa reads what he says are actual entries from his journal from just last June, regarding his own roiling angst with a sense of eye-rolling irony.

Some of the funniest moments of “Pointless” are Mapa’s attempts to sample the dating scene online and then in a Silver Lake “grope bar.” Attempting to present himself as a 6-foot-3-inch Korean German business student while online, his cover was quickly blown.

A few wisecracks about celebrities wander away from the central subject, but then what does one expect in a show with this title? One of the best moments arises from Mapa’s reading that the last royal wedding in England featured a dinner with a buffet line. Mapa takes the role of Queen Elizabeth at the buffet table.

On a more serious note, Mapa also ventures into his relationship with his father, a Filipino immigrant. It’s no surprise that there were some barriers between the two generations, but the gap closed for at least one night through a touching encounter between the two when Mapa was in college.

This is not a landmark show. It’s simply a chance to enjoy Mapa’s gifts as a raconteur and wit. Chay Yew’s direction keeps Mapa on the move, appropriate for a performer who describes himself as having “the attention span of a flashcube,” but Jose Lopez’s lighting and Akeime Mitterlehner’s set are a little fancier than the occasion requires.

* “Pointless,” David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Little Tokyo. Tonight and Sunday, Thursday-Dec. 12, 8 p.m. $15. (213) 625-7000. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.