‘Hanai’ Speaks From Places in the Heart

A private trainer to the stars, Shanti Reinhardt fraternizes routinely with Hollywood’s elite. However, Reinhardt’s autobiographical one-woman show, “Hollywood Hanai,” at Theatre of NOTE, is no dishy tell-all. In fact, Reinhardt’s story, smoothly staged by Sabin Epstein, is surprisingly deep, and as exotic as her name.

Loosely translated, hanai is the Hawaiian word for an abandoned child raised by others. Ditched by her own hippie mother at the age of 3, Reinhardt is taken in by a Filipino Hawaiian family. The blond Reinhardt is a haole (white) out of water in her brown-skinned Hawaiian community, but finds acceptance as a track star. It’s a fitting avocation to outrun a painful past.

Hard-bodied and focused, Reinhardt embraces physical training as a career. Although her comical depictions of her eccentric Hollywood clients sometimes run together, she vividly evokes the characters in her own family. Her portrayal of her dying adoptive mom, an ample, bighearted woman wasted by disease, is shattering. Also painfully effective is Reinhardt’s depiction of her dying birth mother, an inveterately selfish New Ager who promises to be a better mother “on the other side.”

Reinhardt raises our heart rates to an invigorating degree during her aerobic journey to acceptance and forgiveness, an odyssey that concludes with an effectively sentimental paean to Los Angeles, the city that took her in and continues to delight her.

* “Hollywood Hanai,” Theatre of NOTE, 1517 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 16. $12. (323) 856-8611. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Strong Portrayals in an Uneven ‘Porn’ After touring widely and playing off-Broadway, Ronnie Larsen’s “Making Porn” is back in town at the Tiffany. Set in the early 1980s, Larsen’s steamy comedy-drama about the gay porn industry, which stars gay porn idol Ryan Idol in the impressively solid flesh, seems to enjoy a built-in following wherever it goes. Sensationally vulgar, with moments of high hilarity, Larsen’s play is, for the most part, a dramaturgical disaster with little cross-over appeal.

Directed by producer Caryn Horwitz, based on Larsen’s original staging, “Porn” features engaging performers of varying professional proficiency. His face frozen in a utilitarian pout, Idol is well-cast as Jack, a “straight” actor with limited talent and a killer bod. Peter Nevargic is formidably sleazy as a gay porn director who exploits Jack. Appealing Paul Pecorino plays an exuberant young college student who gets swept up in porn and is felled by a new disease called AIDS.

At times funny and involving, the story nosedives with the transformation of Jack’s wife Linda (Katherine Armstrong) from help mate to harridan. With plenty of histrionics but little motivation, the newly bitchy Linda hectors her reluctant hub to pump out porn in the midst of the AIDS crisis, an off-the-wall plot segue that bespeaks a troubling misogyny at “Porn’s” hard core.

* “Making Porn,” Tiffany Theater, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursdays, 8 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 7 and 10 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends Dec. 13. $25-$35. (310) 289-2999. Running time: 2 hours.