CUTTIN’ UP Director Israel Hicks’ staging of Charles Randolph-Wright’s play, set in a quintessential black barber shop, pulls off that rare feat of capturing a people’s culture without jabbing us with melodramatic gestures. The show is an adaptation of Craig Marberry’s book of interviews conducted during 18 months of traveling around the country. Randolph-Wright sets his play in an L.A. barber shop owned by elderly Howard (Adolphus Ward), who hires Andre (Darryl Alan Reed), a footloose barber who’s been drifting across the country from one hair-cutting job to another. Some of the stories that Marberry collected are channeled through Andre’s recollections and come to life in reenactments in the three chairs of Howard’s shop. Rudy (Dorian Logan), a young hip-hop fan, is the third cutter, and fills out the shop’s age spectrum. Although much of the evening consists of what amount to comedy sketches populated by an ensemble of familiar ghetto characters (ministers, cops and con men), the show should not be confused or compared with the slapstick of the Barbershop films. Instead, Cuttin’ Up keeps returning to the sober image of the wandering black man — without a city or destination and, in Andre’s case, without a mother. There are also sly history lessons, as when Howard explains how the popular fade cuts originated in the antebellum South when slave owners used these distinctive styles as a form of brand marking their wearers, if caught traveling, as escaped slaves. That said, the show runs too long and Randolph-Wright loses his focus halfway through. Hicks’ ensemble, however, is electric and Reed turns in a fine performance as an invisible man who is just beginning to see himself. PASADENA PLAYHOUSE, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 4 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; thru April 15 (no perfs March 20 & 28, 8 p.m.; April 4, 8 p.m.; added perf April 4, 2 p.m.). (626... More >>>