STAGE: The Art of the Part

Hot blonde dressed as Little Bo Peep. Weekly theater critic in heat.

What, you didn't think critics had primal urges, too?

Said blonde is one of the lovelies of CCSN's Lysistrata, Aristophanes' tale of leg-locked wives and the pent-up soldier-husbands they leave with un-launched erectile projectiles until they quit their warring ways. (Ari never had to answer to the FCC.)

It's one of five openings (you should pardon the expression) last weekend, and one more than your verklempt critic could drag his tired tuchas to, the short straw, and my apologies, going to Theatre in the Valley's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife.

In the next lifetime or so, perhaps local theater companies will can this cluster-bomb scheduling, splintering a finite audience—not composed entirely of critics paid to mega-schlep to everything—into smaller and smaller factions of potential fans who can't sample all of the wares at once. Who, in fact, might attend at most one play a week amid five productions all elbowing for attention over the same two weekends.

This isn't Broadway. Try maximizing the fan base you've got, rather than minimizing the one you could have.

But until that lifetime, there's this weekend, when the most combustible pairings of play and performance can be pared down to two: Las Vegas Little Theatre's Never the Sinner and UNLV's The Foreigner.

If you've never experienced CJ Maldonado on stage, you've denied yourself the sight of major acting chops in action. You've got one more chance before this gifted Vegas artist is New York-bound. And Tony Blosser joins him as such an interlocking partner that their duel performances merge for a singular achievement as soulless murderers Leopold and Loeb in Never the Sinner.

Well-directed by Courtney Sheets, John Logan's riveting off-Broadway play tracks the infamous 1924 murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks and its aftermath. Why'd they do it? "It was an experiment," say these self-proclaimed intellectual "uber-men," an act equal to "an entomologist killing a beetle on a pin."

While the play skips around the time line—hop-scotching between the defense's and prosecution's cases in court, the killers' first meeting, their "homosexual pact" (Loeb becomes Leopold's lover in exchange for Leopold's complicity in the murder), the crime's planning and commission, police interrogation, press interviews and jail-cell musings—Maldonado (in a black-lacquered wig that takes a few moments to accept) and Blosser grab these roles and flat-out run with them.

Maldonado is all the more chilling for his unforced charm as the amoral-bordering-on-inhuman Robert Loeb. He thoroughly climbs inside this slime. Assured and arrogant, his casual strut and fluid body language never betraying a hint of doubt, his Loeb bullies and cajoles the reluctant Leopold. When he smirks that the child dead by their hand is "beautiful, a work of art," we shudder with the sickening recognition of what fellow humans are capable of.

Blosser lends Maldonado harmonic counterpoint in perfect pitch. A more painfully conflicted soul than Loeb, Blosser's bespectacled Leopold is a swirling tide of twitchy nervousness, pangs of conscience and homosexual yearning leaking through his veneer of smug superiority. It's a dynamic, layered portrayal of a man as vulnerable to self-doubt as he is dismissive of lesser mortals, and with a streak of heartlessness that Loeb exploits to seal his fate.

John Wennstrom inhabits their hard-charging advocate, the legendary Clarence Darrow, with righteous power. Though frozen in a background pose through nearly all of Act I during the prosecution's case, he comes out roaring in Act II, pleading his clients guilty but desperate to buck Chicago's mob-like fury and spare them the gallows with an impassioned argument against the death penalty to an unseen judge (the audience).

Summoning the strength of a wily old lion—a potbellied lion with a stoop-shouldered shuffle and stringy, gray-haired combover—Wennstrom's Darrow is a tired but indomitable battler against what he considers a sin. "I can hate that sin," he rails about the murder, "but never the sinner," his bell-like baritone seeming to rumble up from the core of the Earth. And Jess Martyn Thompson's zealous prosecutor, hell-bent to sling nooses around the defendants' despicable necks, is every inch the worthy adversary.

Never the Sinner (4 stars) Thu.-Sun., LVLT, 362-7996.

Baby-faced Thomas Sawicki plays likable the same way Derek Jeter plays shortstop. A talented verbal and physical comedian, he's the sweet, chewy center of Larry Shue's The Foreigner, a farcical confection about Charlie (Sawicki), a boring, depressed chap staying at a rural Georgia fishing lodge who, wanting to be left alone, pretends not to speak English, as the denizens try to communicate with him. But soon, the residents find their better selves by interacting with this extraordinarily good listener, and Charlie, forced by circumstances to create a "foreign language" and maintain the charade, discovers a personality he never knew he had.

Nimbly directed by Steve Rapella, the ensemble work by some of Nevada Conservatory Theatre's top performers is the play's propellant. Jason Lockhart, who disappears into his roles and comes up with something fresh every time, plays a suspiciously smooth minister with an agenda that drives a parallel plot. In well-balanced support are Joan Mullaney's sprightly lodge owner, who confuses louder English with clearer English; Dana Martin, executing a well-modulated turnaround from sour minister's wife to warmhearted woman; Bryan Gaston as her slow-witted brother who "teaches" Charlie English and gets a lesson in his own self-worth; Kris Pruett's cockney camaraderie as Froggy, a British demolitions expert; and Taylor Haynes' hilarious characterization of Jeff Foxworthy's worst redneck nightmare.

The Foreigner (4 stars) Thu.-Sun., UNLV, 895-2787.

The dazzling brio of Kate Lowenhar is, ironically, one of the few signs of life when she portrays death itself—as a gorgeous dame in red—in the otherwise lackluster quartet of short Insomniac Project sketches about the afterlife. Lowenhar in the closing playlet and Amy Elizabeth Nixon as a sassypants psychic seer of past lives in the opening salvo hold up a tent that otherwise collapses in on itself after 50 quickie minutes.

(LVLT will fold the Insomniac Project's smaller pieces into its Fischer Black Box Theatre program and swap its late-night performances for 8 p.m. shows starting in January.)

Afterlife (2 stars) Fri.-Sun., LVLT.

No performance—not even Stefanie Player's fearless turn in the title role of the no-sex-until-no-war protest leader, as filtered through a Morticia Addams dominatrix fantasy—redeems this contemporized Lysistrata. It's an abstract, cacophonous cauldron of singsong poetry, pot-banging proclamations and dialogue—"We must resort to total abstinence from the prick"—that plays like an R-rated Kiwanis club skit. Lots to work with, little discipline.

But if you're into sets with genitalia imagery, women in I Dream of Jeannie outfits, go-go-boots and mini-wedding dresses, and Army fatigues-draped phalluses, please enjoy.

Or if you have unclean thoughts about Little Bo Peep.

Lysistrata (2 stars) Fri.-Sun., CCSN, East Cheyenne campus, 651-5483.