STAGE REVIEW : Some Juicy Acting Helps a Difficult ‘Day of Hope’ : Birgir Sigurdsson’s drama at LATC wallows self-consciously in domestic dysfunction.

Poets “tell ugly stories beautifully,” says one of the more deluded characters in “Day of Hope,” at Los Angeles Theatre Center.

The author of that line, Icelandic playwright Birgir Sigurdsson, certainly tells an ugly story. Whether you think he tells it beautifully will depend on your taste for overripe psychodrama.

This is psychological Grand Guignol. At its juiciest, it almost seems like a big put-on. The program says Sigurdsson has also translated Christopher Durang’s “Beyond Therapy” into Icelandic . . . could Sigurdsson actually be Durang? Is this the New York jester’s parody of Scandinavian gloom and doom?

Apparently not. Still, there are moments in “Day of Hope” when you can hardly wait for the blackout, so you can finally let out the chuckles that have been rudely accumulating during supposedly serious scenes. Actually, some in the audience on opening night didn’t restrain themselves; they went ahead and snickered while the action was going on.

The laughs arise because the three adult children of poor, widowed, overtime-working Lara (Salome Jens) are so pretentious, each in his or her own way. First and foremost is the insane Alda (Ann Hearn). Not content to be merely catatonic, she interrupts the action repeatedly to spout lines of “pure poetry”--or at least that’s the opinion of everyone on stage, as well as an offstage publisher. She usually utters this stuff while standing at her bedroom window, gazing up at the back rows of LATC’s sharply raked Theatre 2.

Maybe something was lost in transit--this is Patrick Tovatt’s American adaptation of Jill Brooke’s British translation. But Alda’s words sound like bad poetry instead of pure poetry.

She occasionally breaks out of her contemplative mood to scream “soul killers!” or to attempt to stab her mother with a kitchen knife. That’s why this house, designed by Timian Alsaker, has enough locks to resemble an actual prison, as well as a symbolic one.

Next on the list of Lara’s annoying offspring is Hordur (Richard Ortega), a ridiculous caricature of intellectual snobbery and self-proclaimed sensitivity. Hordur professes to love his sister--as long as he doesn’t have to take care of her--but everyone else in the household is the target of Hordur’s incredibly vituperative mouth.

While Hordur is, naturally, slight of build, his kid brother Reynir (Kyle Secor) is a big, tough guy, currently on strike from a job on the docks. Though assigned the insensitive lug role by his family, especially his mother, Reynir too unveils a poet’s heart under his supposedly brutish exterior.

This is less of a surprise to the audience than it is to the family; Reynir’s early diatribe on the subject of midnight, which comes out of the blue in the midst of a family squabble, is a big clue to his nature, overlooked by his own kin. Reynir’s mocking of the hysterical Hordur, expertly handled by Secor, makes up most of the play’s few examples of intended humor.

As if Lara didn’t have enough problems with her kids and their misled memories of their good-for-nothing father, she has imported more trouble: her lover Gunnar (Gregory Wagrowski), a shiftless and drunken wreck with sexual designs on her invalid daughter. Sigurdsson tries to explain Gunnar by trotting out an account of his own past trauma--a story that Lara, not surprisingly, complains she has heard before. But he is such a transparently bad guy that his explanations don’t carry much weight. Gunnar is for hissing.

Lara’s only support comes from her elderly landlady Gudny (Julianna McCarthy), a saintly type who has taken the unfortunate Alda under her wing, much to the chagrin of the possessive Hordur.

The title refers to the notion that something wonderful may yet emerge out of all this domestic horror. Are we supposed to share in this cockeyed optimism? We don’t. Nor does the world outside sound very enticing. It’s 1955, and the young men keep mentioning the atom bomb.

The location is “a port city in the Northern Hemisphere,” though a draft of the script specifies Reykjavik; perhaps the change was supposed to bring us closer to this family’s plight. It doesn’t.

All the same, all is not lost. Approach “Day of Hope” as you might an old-fashioned melodrama, and Bill Bushnell’s staging offers some lip-smacking, capital-A acting. There’s even a hint of horror-film music in Stephen Tobolowsky’s incidental score.

Jens is always worth watching, Wagrowski does well with Gunnar’s fantasies of a better life in Antarctica and the bile flowing among the men is entertaining, if you can survive Alda’s poetry along the way.

“Day of Hope,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, Tuesdays-Sundays,8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends July 14. $23-$28. (213) 627-5599. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

‘Day of Hope’

Gregory Wagrowski: Gunnar

Ann Hearn: Alda

Salome Jens: Lara

Julianna McCarthy: Gudny

Richard Ortega: Hordur

Kyle Secor: Reynir

A play by Birgir Sigurdsson. Director Bill Bushnell. Sets Timian Alsaker. Lights Douglas D. Smith. Costumes Marianna Elliott. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Composer Stephen Tobolowsky. Assistant director Alyson Campbell. Stage manager Nancy Ann Adler.