‘Globe-O-Mania’ at Highways; ‘Night of the Iguana’ at Theatricum Botanicum; ‘Travesties’ at Occidental; ‘Day After Therapy’ at 2nd Stage

Highways is an apt name for the performing-arts space that has been set up in Santa Monica’s tiny industrial sector, especially when it is home to performers like Beth Lapides. Her new act, “Globe-O-Mania,” is a kind of comic cloverleaf, where standard stand-up comedy loops around and converges with an artist’s not-so-standard forms of dialogue and inquiry with a captive audience.

But, unlike most club crowds, this audience is in no prove-it-to-me mood; rather, it seems to share Lapides’ own puzzlement at the state of the globe and the people on it. Lapides, part of the generation that came of age in the ‘70s and thus observed the ‘60s with some amused detachment, plumbs her best material from her conflicting instincts: on one hand, the urge to perfect humanity; on the other, the skeptic’s realization that there are no sacred cows. She proudly announces, for instance, that she’s bought some Nicaraguan coffee, and then wonders aloud like a childlike caffeine junkie, “You mean I can promote world peace by drinking coffee ?!”

Most of the time, Lapides’ New York-paced (speedy and hyper) act keeps just enough ahead of the audience so our eyes are fixed, as on a race-car driver cutting through a turn (Nicole Arbusto directed). When she does dwell on a subject, like the New Age, it’s usually in the form of a personal incident (she was so indecisive about where to experience the Harmonic Convergence “that I slept through it”).

All of this speed, though, is in the Topicality Zone of current crazes and events, which gets wearing. What relieves it is watching her unabashed esoteric appetites (particle physics, semiotics) clash with the junk culture feeding her act. It’s a nice combination for a woman interested in contradictions.

At 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, this Saturday and Sunday, 8:30 p.m., then Saturdays only, 10:30 p.m., through Aug. 26. Tickets: $8; (213) 453-1755.

‘Night of the Iguana’

For those who know Tennessee Williams’ “Night of the Iguana” largely through John Huston’s film version (Richard Burton played the harried Reverend), a visit to Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon will restore the play to its original identity. Where the film got lost in its own ‘60s steaminess (though Burton did not), the play keeps control over its characters’ giddy impulses in the Mexican tropics. Bill Molloy’s production, with the woods and Topanga insects as companions, has sound control over the play.

George McDaniel does overplay his hand from time to time as the Reverend--an easy thing to do with a hysterical man literally tied up in ropes. But during the crucial Act II interactions with Hannah (Ellen Geer), his destitute female counterpart also stranded at Maxine’s rundown hotel, La Costa Verde, McDaniel becomes touching as a man examining his fatal flaws. Geer, and Ford Rainey as her poet grandfather, draw on their emotional reserves when it counts.

You wish Williams had resolved matters differently; having the Reverend stay on with Maxine (crustily played by Kate Geer) is a failure of imagination. But this is a written play, which only begs the question more: Why doesn’t the Botanicum group go repertory? (Their other summer productions are “Pericles” and “Americana: Saints and Sinners.”) This cast, you sense, might pull it off.

At 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga, on Saturdays, 8 p.m., through September 2. Tickets: $11; (213) 455-3723.

‘Travesties’

Occidental College’s Summer Theatre Festival takes it as part of its call to do Shakespeare, usually Shaw (though not this year), and Gilbert and Sullivan for variety. It’s a tough club to break into, but in the festival’s 30th year, Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” qualifies.

Stoppard’s gifts, which include a first-class intelligence and an effortless knack for entertaining, come together almost perfectly in “Travesties.” It’s a built-in joke here that a play that deals with the bubbling Zurich intelligentsia of 1917--James Joyce, Dadaist Tristan Tzara, V.I. Lenin--has as its central character a bumbling British foreign officer named Henry, whose taste in art runs to . . . Gilbert and Sullivan (the Occidental regulars, at the outdoor Hillside Theatre, loved that one).

They seemed to not always track Stoppard’s verbal arsenal of limericks, puns, “Importance of Being Earnest” and other literary references (odd to be in a sizeable crowd in which the same five people laugh at all the right spots).

To be sure, Christopher Shelton’s pleasant though hardly world-beating cast, led by Tom Shelton’s time-warped Henry, crisply sends every Stoppardism into the night air. Oddities include Charles Klausmeyer’s daffy Tzara losing his dialect at moments, and Tom Lowell’s Lenin losing, then regaining, his beard. Susan Gratch’s library/parlor room set also looks odd outdoors--not surprising, since this is very much an indoors play (the new Keck Theatre might have been a better home).

At 1600 Campus Road, on Saturday, Aug. 4, 11, 24, 29, 8:30 p.m., through Aug. 29. Tickets: $8-$13; (213) 259-2772.

‘Day After Therapy’

Comment heard from audience member at the end of Daniel J. Alonzo’s “Day After Therapy” at 2nd Stage Theatre: “That was like a day at the office.” He was referring to a therapy clinic, the basic setting of the evening’s second half (these are actually two one-acts under an umbrella title).

It did feel like a day at the office, which is not what theater is for. Act II also carried over all the worst aspects of Act I: depictions of young gay men in all their self-tortured, stereotyped banality; bathos confused for drama; and an I’m-OK-you’re-OK therapeutic dogma that some of us thought went out in the ‘70s. The cast needs some no-nonsense guidance, which director Ken McFarlane does not provide.

At 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., on Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 5 p.m. Tickets: $12; (213) 466-1767.