‘Crushed’: Rosenthal Talkin’ ‘bout His Generation

The only thing more deceiving about Lee Rosenthal’s show than its title--”Crushed”--is its subtitle: “Tales From the twentynothing Generation.” At Theatre/Theater, Rosenthal hardly comes off as a 26-year-old guy crushed and flattened by the inflating pressures of contemporary life. And if he’s at all representative of his fellow baby busters, it’s hardly a generation enamored with nothingness.

Rosenthal’s is an act of struggle with representation. He questions not only whether he can speak for his peers, but also whether he has any right to. It’s what makes this a performance, rather than the simple telling of five stories, and the combination naturally connects with the audience. (Pianist Zachary, in a tux, adds uneven show biz to the performance.)

His stories come this close to wallowing in remembrance--his blank suburban Long Island home, the school pals who momentarily lose their minds--and then step back, as if given a good slap of absurdity. Those pals, for instance, end up falling for each other, and leave Lee behind (and later, they marry, then divorce).

Even the nostalgic fiction he weaves around the writing of Cole Porter’s tune “Just One of Those Things” ends up being a joke on nostalgia itself. And by deliberately ignoring the ‘60s as he looks back, Rosenthal suggests that baby boomers have had their time. The busters are waiting.

“Crushed: Tales From the twentynothing Generation,” Theatre/ Theater, 1713 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. Sundays, 8 p.m. En d s Aug. 16. $10; (213) 469-9689. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.

Dinah Manoff Adapts Father’s ‘Telegram’

As “Telegram From Heaven” opens, the Germans have invaded Minsk. When it ends, the Japanese have invaded Pearl Harbor. America is growing up. So is Sylvia Singer (Valerie Landsburg).

Yet even as the East Bronx characters get wise to the world and each other in Dinah Manoff’s and Dennis Bailey’s adaptation of the novel of the same name by Manoff’s father, Arnold, the play stops growing. What begins as a charming, unabashedly old-fashioned slice of 1940s ethnic New York life winds down into domestic drabness and political platitudes.

Sylvia, narrating her life dilemmas--a ho-hum boyfriend, no job in sight--feels like the product of a novel, and the play’s episodic nature adds to the feeling. She’s self-assured enough to resist becoming a makeup doll like her manhandled girlfriend (Rhonda Aldrich, in a superbly calibrated performance), and Landsburg’s winning bullishness perfectly fits Sylvia.

So too for the rest of director Manoff’s cast at the Hudson Theatre--a living denial of the untruth that local talent has abandoned the theater. Edith Fields’ and Michael Kostroff’s few moments course from the gentle to the chilling, while Peter Gregory as the boyfriend and Andrew Mark Berman as Sylvia’s brother ooze with young male confusion. Aaron Heyman’s shopkeeper is a fine wise man and Renee Taylor’s mom feels palpably stuck in life.

She is also stuck with much of the play’s kitchen-sink hum-drumness, just as Landsburg is stuck having to mouth some hollow climactic speechifying about “the world” and “politics” and how she now believes in something. It’s nonsense, since Sylvia has always believed in the very thing we like her for--herself. Just as the country was rudely awakened by Pearl Harbor, so “Telegram From Heaven” needs jolts of the unexpected to stir it from its dramatic slumber.

“Telegram From Heaven,” Hudson Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 6. $18; (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours.

Twin Bill Gets Even at the Fountainhead

Playwrights often view their money writing as an irritating interruption of their real writing. In response, Percy Granger and Bryan Goluboff have hatched two one-acts as smart-aleck revenge, under Jerry Levine’s direction at the Fountainhead Theatre.

Granger’s “Scheherazade” is the more adventurous, bending time, space and reality as soap opera producers tear their hair out over a crucial plot revelation. The joke is that the unimaginative producers need an idea man, who arrives in the form of a suave, gun-toting stranger (Joseph Carberry). The last joke is hardly a topper, making the thin point that soaps (for which Granger has written) literally lock out good ideas. Levine’s actors pump up the thinness by playing it like frantic rats in a maze.

Goluboff’s “Big Al” recalls the conventional writing out of the Ensemble Studio Theatre, where both of these pieces were developed. Screenwriting, Goluboff’s own money work, is the target here, as Leo (David Packer) tries to turn his sick obsession with Al Pacino into a story meeting with his pal, Rickey (Willie Garson). But it’s painfully obvious that this is going nowhere, except back to Leo hunkering down for another late-night video run of “Scarface.”

“Scheherazade” and “Big Al,” Fountainhead Theatre, 1110 N. Hudson Ave., Hollywood. Aug. 7-9, 11-13 and 21-23, 8 p.m. $10; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

James Best’s ‘Hell Bent’ Courts the Industry

“The Kentucky Cycle” was not so long ago that writer-director James Best’s look at a Depression-era Harlan County, Ky., family, “Hell Bent for Good Times,” can’t avoid being an embarrassingly simple, sappy also-ran. Even putting the “Cycle” aside, Best’s soft comedy at the Court Theatre makes a great case that showcase theater is a blot on the landscape.

Life in 1930s Harlan County was unimaginably hard. But this being a tryout for (says the program) “the leaders of the Entertainment Industry,” life in Best’s Harlan is kinda wacky, kinda cute, kinda sad--kinda prime time. It’s the sort of material where the crazy old grandmother sleeps under the shotgun shack, then scampers to the outhouse for laughs. Best, both as writer and as the family elder, fills the play’s cavities with time-killing banter while sentimentalizing his play’s real theme--death. Entertainment Industry leaders wouldn’t want it any other way.

“Hell Bent for Good Times,” Court Theatre, 722 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 16. $15-$18; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.