BIG DEATH & LITTLE DEATH Strobe lights, a crashingly loud live death metal band, apocalyptic musings and a second act full of false endings make Mickey Birnbaum’s episodic play both intriguing and interminable. Dad (Jeff LeBeau) has returned from the first Gulf War a psychic wreck, which puts him in sync with his dysfunctional Valley family. Mom (Rhonda Aldrich) is his unfaithful wife, daughter Kristi (Jeanne Syquia) keeps a scrapbook full of car-accident photos Dad supplies her from his civilian job, and son Gary (Sean Wing) smokes, snorts and drops drugs as he decides between going to college or destroying the universe (seriously). The teens are the story’s black-hole center, and their lives play out against obsessions with pain and death metal. As a scenarist, Birnbaum displays an imaginative palette for situations, but his suburban fable shows little focus and its metaphors literally get trapped in the family home’s crawlspace. Disjointed speculations about time, space and mortality receive short shrift in favor of stoner humor. The evening invariably unfolds as a series of interchangeable and mostly expendable scenes. The prevailing tone is one of emphatic wonderment, which makes us wonder what this production would have been like if director Larry Biederman had dialed down the performances for a few of the scenes. His design team, though, provides a thoroughly convincing milieu of desolation, from Claire Bennett’s set (car-wreck debris and tract-house innards) to John Eckert’s foreboding light plot to David B. Marling’s jarring sound design. Road Theatre Company at the LANKERSHIM ARTS CENTER, 5108 N. Lankershim Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; thru July 21.... More >>>