THEATER BEAT

Crime scenes to keep you smiling

Director-designer Dave Barton maintains seamless transitions on his black-box setting, dominated by a floor painting of the Union Jack, and has assembled an awesomely courageous cast. Tai's accent is erratic, but her investment is heartbreaking. Cramer's stylized approach neatly dovetails with Martin's fluid immediacy and Jennings' stolid solidity. Parker is riveting, carrying the play's surreal autoerotic climax in tandem with the extraordinary Bennett.

Here, as elsewhere, Ravenhill's emotional poetry outstrips his sardonic polemic, and the plot's high stakes evaporate in a perfunctory resolution. Yet merely mounting such provocative theater in the seat of conservative Orange County seems heroic, and recommends these "Polaroids" to adventurous audiences.

Why Jez Butterworth's "Mojo" won the 1995 Olivier Award -- for best comedy, no less -- is anybody's guess. Brash, raw and violent, Butterworth's play about disenfranchised young Cockneys on the fringes of the early London rock 'n' roll scene is a bit of a mess, and only intermittently funny.

However, at the Armory Northwest in Pasadena, the Furious Theatre Company has a whacking wonderful time with Butterworth's diffuse and desultory period piece, which affords a grim yet fascinating peep into London's lower depths, circa 1958.

The play opens in the shabby upstairs office of Ezra's Atlantic, an inner-city nightclub. During intermission, Shawn Lee's terrific set transforms into the nightclub itself, working beer taps and all. Outside, it's high summer, but within these cold gray confines, you'd never know it. It's the perfectly claustrophobic atmosphere for these Dead End characters, trapped in Britain's unforgiving class system.

Silver Johnny (Nick Cernoch) is the play's McGuffin, the elusive object of everyone's ambition and desire. A brilliant teen rocker on the verge of stardom, Silver Johnny was "discovered" by Ezra, the club's pederastic owner. Now, Sam Ross, a ruthless mobster, is poaching on Ezra's preserves.

Ezra and Sam are never seen, but the bloody consequences of their altercation trickle down on the club's buffoonish underlings, Sweets (Eric Pargac), Sid Potts (Damaso Rodriguez), and Skinny (Brad Price). For Ezra's deeply disturbed son Baby (Lee), the violence triggers a psychic eruption. Yet for Mickey (James C. Leary), the club's paternalistic and deceptively nurturing assistant manager, the situation spells opportunity.

Still, it takes an intrepid company to tackle a piece this challenging, and the young Turks at the Furious Company are nothing if not daring. Voice and speech consultant Pamela Vanderway does her typically fine job overseeing the play's Cockney dialects, which are, on the whole, remarkably convincing.

Back home, Marco created a moral firestorm over his cathartic title creation, barely avoiding prison through a plea-bargaining attorney (Kathi Chandler).

With the reparative therapy prescribed by his leering psychiatrist (Andrew Leman), the court's moratorium on his drawing and the unspeakable childhood horrors embedded in his work, Marco hovers near meltdown.

Under Julie Brigg's brisk direction, "Comix" resembles "Beavis and Butthead" written by the young Christopher Durang. Johnston skewers family values, slacker culture, judicial ineptitude and Starbucks -- and that's just for starters.

However, the satire is more profanely droll than truly scathing. Johnston pushes the narrative envelope beyond its structural capacity, with Marco's revelations foreseeable and the abrupt sunny ending a wild misfire.

"Comix" is certainly original, but if this graphic novelty desires widespread syndication, additional panels are needed.