Theater Reviews: Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, Cousin Bette, The Peacock Men

GO  COUSIN BETTE Drawn from Balzac’s La Comèdie humaine, playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation revolves around a cunning woman’s campaign to avenge herself on the rich relatives who have callously dismissed her as shabby and unimportant. Sheltered, and fed with scraps of food off her pretty cousin’s plate, poor-relation Bette Fischer (Nike Doukas) grows up nurturing her hate, eventually evolving into a plain-faced spinster who is everybody’s confidante but nobody’s friend. Brilliantly Machiavellian, Bette’s fastidious plot to destroy the family involves arranging a liaison between her attractive neighbor and abused wife, Valerie (Jen Dede), and Hector (John Prosky), the lecherous and profligate husband of her virtuous cousin, Adeline (Emily Chase ). Bette also acquires wealth (and thus power) by promoting the work of a young Polish sculptor, Steinbock (Daniel Bess), with whom she’s fallen in love — unfortunately for her, since he ends up betrothed to Adeline’s daughter, Hortense (Kellie Matteson). Directed by Jeanie Hackett, the production purposefully underscores the source material’s melodramatic elements — for example, heightening the narrative’s key points with the melancholy refrains of Chopin. At least one key performance is overladen with shtick, and some fine-tuning of others is in order. Still, Doukas is terrific, delivering a consummate performance that arouses, for her long-suffering deceitful character, pity, disdain — and admiration. Alongside the story’s bathos is its salient reminder of what cruelty, indifference and injustice can do to the human spirit. Deaf West Theatre, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.; thru March 21. (818) 506-5436. (Deborah Klugman)

GO  HAMLET When this Hamlet (Charles Pasternak) says he’ll “put an antic disposition on,” he means it. Pasternak’s prince is sometimes maniacal, bounding around and turning somersaults. He brandishes his wit savagely and at times — as in the closet scene with Gertrude (Jessica Temple) — he can be downright brutal. He’s particularly good in the comic scenes with Rosencrantz (director Thomas Bigley) and Guildenstern (Gus Krieger). There’s not much of the “sweet prince” about him, but it’s a performance that works. He receives solid support from Temple, Jack Leahy, doubling as Claudius and the Ghost; Jamey Hecht as Polonius; and Taylor Fisher as Ophelia. Director Bigley provides a mostly direct and straightforward production, despite a few gaffes: the First Actor’s speech about Pyrrhus is so tricked-out with superfluous business that it’s both awkward and absurd. On the plus side, Bigley gives us a generous portion of the text, tactfully edited. Costumer Jessica Pasternak is clearly battling budgetary limitations, but her decision to try to convert modern men’s suits into period costumes is more distracting than helpful. It’s a long evening (more than three hours) but an engrossing one. Flight Theatre, 6472 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Thurs. & Sat., 8 p.m.; thru Feb. 13. (951) 262-3030. (Neal Weaver)

PARADISE STREET Title3 is a new company dedicated to giving women strong, unusual, fascinating roles. For its first production, it has chosen Constance Congdon’s dark sociological piece about class resentment and privilege. Jane (Molly Leland), a brilliant, assured and beautiful professor of gender and semiotics — who drops phrases like “the nomenclature of the patriarchal case for hegemony” as easily as ordering a club sandwich — has just moved to a small college town with her self-centered, elderly mother (Danielle Kennedy). Just before the semester starts, Jane’s battered into a coma by a homeless woman (Lane Allison, in a menacing portrayal), who’s bitter over being one of society’s invisibles. As Jane struggles to make at best a partial recovery from irreversible brain damage, her attacker steals Jane’s identity, and is delighted to find that she’s treated as an icon. It’s true: The haves get more while the have-nots suffer. The mechanics of Congdon’s plot don’t make a lick of sense, but we’re hooked by the premise, and by director Courtney Munch’s great ensemble — filled out by Jiehae Park, Jane Montosi and Lorene Chesley in a variety of roles. By intermission, however, the play has made its point. It nonetheless continues to pad along, wedging in scenes in which a Puerto Rican social worker shows Jane’s mother how to use a Kegel exerciser, one of Montosi’s characters silently mops an entire floor, and the homeless attacker babysits her publisher’s drug-addicted daughter. To paraphrase a program note, Congdon needs to appraise this two-and-a-half hour muddle and chip away everything that doesn’t look like the very smart play about class tensions buried inside. The Attic Theatre and Film Center, 5429 W. Washington Blvd., L.A.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; thru Feb. 21. (323) 525-0661. (Amy Nicholson)

THE PEACOCK MEN Deconstructing American masculinity can be a sticky thicket even in the best of analyses. Add to the mix issues of race and representation, however, and its order of complexity increases exponentially. So it’s no surprise that playwright Ronald McCants’ idea-packed, satiric foray into the psychic minefield of black male identity can be as profoundly disorienting as it is provocative. For McCants’ hapless cast of circus-performing Peacock Men — African-Americans who, like their brilliantly plumed namesake, have been domesticated into gender-warped docility — the ride is also downright deadly. One performer, Robert Mapplethorpe’s horse-hung the Man in the Polyester Suit (Hari Williams), has already succumbed after his reduction to an erotically objectified exhibit and his mysterious disappearance by the sadistic, white-faced Ringmaster, Steve (Will Dixon). So when avaricious street rapper Cash (Chris P. Daniels) signs on as a replacement, he finds himself with a job both physically and existentially more perilous than he bargained for. Turns out Steve’s circus is more of a torture fun house in which Cash and his cohorts (John J. Jordan & Michael A. Thompson) are subjected to humiliations and acts of violence scripted right out of real-world headlines (Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, etc.). While Ayana Cahrr’s staging loses crucial dramatic momentum during some of the play’s lengthier, overly didactic passages, McCants’ nightmare vaudeville proves a field day for its terrifically talented ensemble. Company of Angels, Alexandria Hotel, 501 S. Spring St., dwntwn.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; thru March 7. (323) 883-1717. (Bill Raden)