STAGE REVIEW : ‘CANDY AND SHELLEY’ WHOOP IT UP

A comedy about two city women stranded in the middle of nowhere, “Candy and Shelley Go to the Desert” is a hoot at Theater West.

The actresses--Melinda Peterson and Catherine MacNeal--are not only funny but also delectable. The direction by Michael Barker turns farce into serio-comic drama. And playwright Paula Cizmar lays waste the idea that feminists can’t laugh at themselves.

Produced as part of the theater’s limited Sunday matinee series (and extended next month for purposes of the L. A. Fringe Festival), the production is a West Coast premiere, a long one-act that blows about like tumbleweed. It also features a quirky, ill-disguised black-jacketed biker turn by Casey King, a supporting third player who is more truly the Howdy Doody character on his T-shirt.

What is so interesting about the women’s relationship, besides their manic inability to cope with an overheated car in “a graveyard for lizards,” is their love-hate standoff.

These women are New Yorkers, the closest of friends, who just had to get away from it all and find an open space. The tall loony Peterson, dressed in khaki shorts and sensible hiking shoes, climbs up on a high rock, sensually rubs her long legs with sun tan oil and indulges in a hilarious sexual fantasy outlined against a great dome of blue sky. But the important point is that it’s sexy. This woman’s mind is sunbaked with eroticism.

Meanwhile, the sunglassed, red-visored and blonde MacNeal, inappropriately dressed in high heels and a party dress like something out of Little Bo Peep, rails against her fate with a high-pitched determination that is oddly winsome. The play has a lovely ambiguity, the more masculine Peterson seemingly locked into heterosexual romance, the more feminine and practical MacNeal admitting she had made love to her companion’s ex-boyfriend.

You know something has to unravel out there in the desert, but no one reaches the end of the rope. There’s an intriguing sense of a latent homosexuality between these women, something as thin as a wafer, and you know it will stay latent too. There’s no sentimentality here, no schmaltz. Better they give the absolutely dismayed biker fits and leave the desert to the lizards. (The squirmy rubbery things are featured in a curious funereal ritual as enthralling as it’s funny.)

Psychologically and comically and with a whoop, these actresses are on top of their material.

Smart contributions are David Taylor’s desert set and his textured lighting and John Paul Jones’ sound (the vroom of an unseen pack of bikers, combined with the women’s mixed reactions, is a sly index to the production’s humor).

Performances are at 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Sunday and Aug. 30, 3 p.m., Sept. 4, 8 p.m., Sept. 5, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Sept. 6, 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets: $6. (213) 851-7977.