An Amusing Take on Flag Burning by the Zeta Collective

What is it now? Burn a flag, go to jail? To some, that sounds reasonable. To others, that sounds like latent totalitarianism. It’s also a little bit funny, as most things are when you think about them long enough. Mime artist William Fisher has thought about flag burning, and the result is an amusing piece, “Ready? Begin!,” the better half of the Zeta Collective’s “Half Life Bis” at the Zeta Theatre.

Fisher’s man is a lonely figure buffeted by the winds of patriotism and gusts of blowhard rhetoric projected through the boom box of mass media. (Bush and Reagan are heard on the sometimes muddy sound track, and so is a gentle-sounding German voice--Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”) He is twisted, pulled, tugged and cajoled, and it’s no surprise that he gives in to join the army. Besides being a fine display of corporeal mime influenced by Etienne Decroux and made doubly fine by Ellen Schimmel’s music, “Ready? Begin!” tells a story with a comic accent and ends on a funny, chilling image.

The startling aspect of the second piece, “Crowd Work” by Paul Jones, is seeing performer Fanny de Sousa appear as Jones’ proper City of London man. It works because this corporate soldier is having a major problem with enlarging breasts--tumescences, as he calls them. An apt term, because he’s a clinical fellow who gives an account of his problems as if they were someone else’s.

But once the shock wears off, the piece itself becomes clinical (director Fisher pushes this approach by placing a transparent scrim between us and De Sousa). Jones’ writing never gets below the fascinating surface, and De Sousa’s success with the role is strictly technical--the male behavior tics, for instance, are dead on. This is an anatomy of a body, not a person.

At 929 East 2nd St., on Saturdays, 8:30 p.m., through Feb. 24. Tickets: $10; (213) 617-8259.

Scattershot ‘Riding Club’ at West Coast Ensemble

Plays that try to please everyone usually end up pleasing no one. In Avner Garbi’s production at West Coast Ensemble, Kerry Kennedy’s “The Riding Club” wants to be, simultaneously, a light sitcom, a New Age meta-tale, a Southern comedy of manners and a feel-good morality story.

This isn’t the route to dramatic success, unless you have a first-class imagination. Kennedy doesn’t show it here, and her attempts at crowd-pleasing cancel out each other, all at the service of a pat moral: Life is here to be lived, so live it. She prods and manipulates her five female characters--chummy in school, now atomized in their ‘30s--so they fit the message. The puppet strings show.

The terminally ill Addy (Cynthia Steele), for example, is too blatantly the symbol of human sacrifice as she leaves the hospital for a more spiritual death. Her pal Christmas (Jeanine Jackson) is too obviously the voice of flawed, likable Everywoman. Mary Louise (Nancy Boykin) is too stolidly the Bourgeois Wife--even her human slips feel manipulated. Jan Sheldrick’s Bobby Joe and Lisa Denke’s Patty Lynn are too clearly puppets in Kennedy’s hands.

The actresses can’t escape this aura of manipulation, though they’re all good at playing types. Types, though, are for TV; Kennedy is a young playwright, and she needs to let her characters dictate their own terms.

At 6240 Hollywood Blvd., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; until Feb. 25. Tickets: $12.50; (213) 871-1052.

Afro-American Musical at Inglewood Civic

Poet Robert Bly has talked about the need for boys and men to develop relations with male mentors. The lack of them in African-American communities, for example, is a cause for the gang culture. Writer-director Cepheus Jaxon has this in mind with his musical history, “The African American,” at Inglewood Civic Theatre.

An elderly man on the bus bench whips some young punks into shape by telling them the story of how African people, forced into slavery across the ocean, have been fighting their way to freedom ever since. It’s a hackneyed narrative conceit on which to hang two acts worth of musical numbers. Some hang better than others.

The African sections (especially the artful slave ship sequence), along with those in the city and during the Roaring ‘20s, crackle and buzz because of Jaxon’s hugely energetic ensemble. In the singing and dancing departments, involvement rules over precision: The heat is on, while the pacing is cold. “The African American” is best as an entertaining history lesson for the young, so the chapters not in the show--Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanism, civil rights battles in the ‘50s and Malcolm X, for example--are glaring by their absence.

At 151 Grevillea, Inglewood, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m.; indefinitely. Tickets: $20; (213) 671-1123.

Send-Up of Male Paranoia at L.A. Art Theatre

On the surface, Carl Miller’s “The Feminists” looks like a speculative fiction playing off of every male sexist’s nightmare: Feminist militants take over the country, ban recreational sex and force men into slavery or prison.

The whole business, though, amounts to nothing more than a hopped-up, R-rated, ultra-tongue-in-cheek send-up in the tradition of “Saturday Night Live.” You see, the narrator (a mock-stentorian Marcus Smythe) confesses to being the “author”: We’re to view “The Feminists” as the fantasy of a paranoid male mind.

It’s all fairly mindless, in fact. In Charles Randolph Wright’s cast at Los Angeles Art Theatre, only Paul Satterfield’s suitably blank super-hero and Eileen T’Kaye’s cackling henchwoman have the nerve to play their roles to the needed extreme. Junk-food theater like this should work at least as a guilty pleasure. The only pleasing thing about “The Feminists” is that it’s over in an hour.

At 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; indefinitely. Tickets: $9.99; (818) 763-3101.

Word-Tripping at Alliance’s ‘Jump Camp’

Larry Blamire’s “Jump Camp” exudes promise, from the setting--a desert ghost town where an author and her agent are searching out a reclusive intellectual--to character names indebted to Thomas Pynchon: Royd Vaugus, Axel Ten Eyck, Bathsheba Mae Dorn, Finney Stickes.

At the Alliance Theatre under Dean Coleman’s direction, though, the bad signs come early and often: The banter between Peter Fox’s agent and Petrea Burchard’s author is deep in sitcom land, and the couple’s subsequent encounter with the town’s citizens becomes Blamire’s indulgent exercise in linguistic doodling.

His plot turns (which we won’t reveal) posit a reason for the dialogue spew, which nevertheless doesn’t excuse it. “Jump Camp” devolves into an extraordinary imposition on the listener, since its pointless narrative contortions and word-tripping become a choke-hold on both our imagination and the cast’s ability to enliven the absurdist goings-on. Choked, too, is Blamire’s point--that brilliant minds, left unchecked, can cause havoc. A good point for word-loving playwrights to keep in mind.

At 3204 Magnolia Blvd., Burbank, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., until March 11. Tickets: $12; (818) 566-7935.

A Strange ‘Bird’ at the Coronet

The Coronet Theatre used to house distinguished plays. Now it houses something billed as a “theatography” titled “Bird of Passage.” Never mind that it doesn’t fly. We’re talking crash and burn.

Let’s see if we have this right. Manju (Tom Ashworth) is the inventor of an “organic computer” named Interim. On the other hand, Manju denies that he’s a scientist. He applies for a development grant to “The Council,” a black-clad quintet of rulers (what they rule is unclear). They turn him down, his wife leaves him for Manju’s buddy, and then the Council gets nasty.

Imagine a high school show mixing video, science fiction and ballet, on a budget, and you might get the idea. Interim is depicted in director-choreographer Zina Bethune’s staging as four little ballerinas, dressed in leotards with glowing lights.

Playing time is largely consumed with one derivative pas de deux after another. It’s a painfully saving grace, since the cast can’t muster one convincing line delivery. On the other hand, co-authors Linda Pace and Bethune can’t muster a convincing line. The council chants, “Itemize! Categorize! Specify!” Manju visits his buddy and says, “I came to see you, ‘cause I came to see you.” Manju’s wife tells him, “Interim may be the future, but I need you now.”

We don’t need this.

At 366 N. La Cienega Blvd., tonight and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3:30 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $18; (213) 659-2400.