STAGE REVIEW : ‘Carnage’ Is Biting Gospel Cartoon

Praise the Lord and keep those phone calls coming! “Carnage” is back, at the Tiffany Theatre.

Last summer, when the Actors’ Gang tried out this piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art, everybody was talking about Jim and Tammy Bakker. Now everybody is talking about Jimmy Swaggart. “Carnage” connects to both cases.

There’s no sex angle, though. As far as writers Adam Simon and Tim Robbins are concerned, there are worse sins that a man of the cloth can commit than adultery. Or venality, when it comes to that. If “Carnage” starts out as a roast of money-grubbing TV evangelists, it ends up preferring this kind of preacher to the alternative. Elmer Gantry does less damage than Savonarola.

In the end, as in the beginning, we have Lee Arenberg’s Rev. Cotton Slocum. Cotton is not one of your pretty boy religious broadcasters. He’s as squat as a pit bull, with eyes to match. But when he says “doom,” dragging it out like a tornado warning, people in TV land just naturally run for their sugar bowls and send him money.

Cotton knows that he’s a rascal. When he flies off to Las Vegas for a weekend, he tells his flock that he’s “meditating in the desert.” Still, he does think of himself as working for the Lord, or vice versa. That’s why he pitches a fit when the Lord fails to sweep him up to heaven after he’s blown up in an explosion at a local Indian monument. Talk about gratitude!

Up to this point, “Carnage” is an amusingly rough cartoon of the save-a-soul business in the age of TV. Now, without losing its crayoned quality, it takes on the air of a hallucination, maybe Cotton’s.

Is he dead or not? Wandering in the desert, he is tempted by ghouls--a dead couple in an auto wreck (Kyle Gass and Lisa Moncure) who, horribly, can’t stop talking about their credit cards and their Century 21 agent. These, too, we see, are worshipers, as pathetic and bizarre as anybody in Cotton’s flock.

The whole thing is bizarre. Cotton not only can’t achieve the Pearly Gates, he can’t get into his own theme park. It has been taken over by his formerly meek assistant (Ned Bellamy), now revealed to be a True Believer who really does think the Antichrist is coming up from the border next week, and who is arming his troops for the battle.

That explosion wasn’t an accident, and there will be more of them. We end with a new kind of gospel service, in which a dopey and rather lovable weekend warrior named Ralph (Brent Hinkley) gets “saved,” to the horror of his wife, Dot (Shannon Holt), who knows how the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose.

Dot is the only totally sane person in “Carnage” and, it could be said, the only Christian in it. Everyone else is following some kind of personal obsession as the Word of God, and trying to force the world to go along with it.

“Carnage” doesn’t present this as a literal picture of the evangelical movement in the late ‘80s, but the play does suggest that the potential for this kind of religious fanaticism is there in America--that the idea of a jihad or “holy war” isn’t strictly reserved for the Ayatollah and his crazies.

The real problem with Elmer Gantry, then, may be that he paves the way for Savonarola. That’s a more original point to make just now than that some ministers get hot pants, and “Carnage” doesn’t tiptoe around in making it. It’s a responsible cartoon--Dot’s presence assures that--but a tough one.

The piece hasn’t transferred to the Tiffany without problems. The script could be clearer and shorter. The acting under Tim Robbins’ direction tends to be a little bit in love with itself. The black drape backdrops are a drag. But for its energy and its willingness to come out and say something about a risky topic, “Carnage” is to be seen. Maybe it’s starting not to be the ‘50s again.

Plays Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m. Runs indefinitely. Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd. (213) 652-6165. Tickets $15-$18.

‘CARNAGE’

A new comedy, presented by the Actors’ Gang at the Tiffany Theatre. Written by Adam Simon and Tim Robbins. Director Robbins. Producer Patti McGuire. Production manager Christopher Fessenden. Lighting Cecile Gailuzzo and R. S. Hoyes. Costumes Christina Banks. Set Mit Snibbor. Musical director David Robbins. Composer and musician Darryl Tewes. Backdrop artists Catherine Hardwicke and Robyn Reichek. Stage manager Michel Chenelle. With Lee Arenberg, Ned Bellamy, Barney Burman, Cynthia Ettinger, Jeff Foster, Kyle Gass, Brent Hinkley, Shannon Holt, Lisa Moncure, Dean Robinson, Steve Ruggles, James Terry, J. C. Thom, Cari Dean Whittemore.