‘Gargoyle Jam’ at Actor’s Lab; ‘Flying Words Project’ at Friends; ‘One Red Rooster’ at the Cast; ‘Hacking New York’ in Long Beach

“Spring Awakening” isn’t the only show in town that has already begun as we file into the theater. Climb up a set of stairs adjacent to a Melrose diner, saunter down a long hallway to the Ossetynski Actor’s Lab, and you’ll find writer/performer David W. W. Johnstone already seated in an old living room sofa chair, humming, fixed on a distant idea.

The idea becomes “Gargoyle Jam,” a (roughly) 75% planned and 25% improvised performance piece of rhymes, excursions and tales on the modern male condition. Diagnosis? The patient, Johnstone finds, is in only moderately serious straits, but it’s something no therapist can cure.

If it were, you suspect, Johnstone wouldn’t have the desire to turn into art what are clearly internal reflections on the conflicts endured by a sensitive man in the ‘80s. Thus, “Gargoyle Jam” is at the opposite end of the solo confessional genre from Shane McCabe’s pseudo-theatrical, therapy-drenched “No Place Like Home,” or Paul Linke’s “Time Flies When You’re Alive.”

For one thing, Johnstone maintains the illusion throughout that he could be talking about some other fellow. Early on, he isn’t even sure that he can go on with the show--the improvising of words and actions has to be just right --but he finds a way back into the story. It’s a bit disingenuous, but this is much more than a guy spilling his guts out on stage.

Fear is the tie that binds in this man’s life, in the form of a tarantula, or impotence, or eternal stasis. This last brings up the gargoyles, who are as ugly as he sees himself to be; but, as he notes from Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse”: “Sometimes the uglier we are, the more perversely attractive we are.”

Johnstone recalls Buck Henry’s manner of hiding subversive demons behind a facade of middle American normalcy, and his performance transcends fear itself with some inspired improvised rhymed passages. Art is better therapy than therapy.

At 7315 Melrose Ave., tonight and Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends Saturday. Tickets: $5; (213) 874-4268.

‘Flying Words Project’

“One way a culture oppresses a minority culture is through language.” A performer merely saying this wouldn’t get the message across. But when deaf performer Peter Cook says it, and when hearing performer Kenny Lerner signs it (as they do in their collection of pieces, “Flying Words Project” at Friends and Artists Theatre), the message becomes a polemic of depth.

Theirs is a theater held aloft by language: American Sign Language (or ASL, by Cook) and English (usually spoken by the unobtrusive Lerner). What makes this “Project” more than a show with words signed for deaf audience members is Cook’s body language, his control over a large physical vocabulary.

In a fanciful piece like “Weak Spot: How a Simple Game of Frisbee Changes the Earth as We Know It,” Lerner keeps the words to a minimum as Cook’s movement shows a Frisbee game triggering a global flood. One moment, Cook will show a character’s “close-up,” then shift to a “long shot” of an object or scene, then “cut” to another “angle,” all by way of bodily twists and turns.

The fanciful is balanced by the seriously political, as in the final piece, “Mokita,” about a multi-generational Salvadoran family, the assassination of Archbishop Romero and El Salvador’s fate as a baseball game.

Cook and Lerner haven’t yet found a consistent balance between Beat-inspired poetry, complex storytelling, and a clear expression of the story’s action. We could also do without Lerner’s tendency to affect a sing-song vocal style typical of much children’s theater. But this remains a remarkable indication of theater’s potential to embrace, and give voice to, a culture’s oppressed.

At 1761 N. Vermont Ave., on Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m., through March 19. Tickets: $12.50; (213) 664-0689.

‘One Red Rooster’

Anthony Palace’s “One Red Rooster” is one self-defeating play. In Kathleen Mazzola’s production at the Cast Theatre, virtually everything in this tale of delusions and death in a collapsing mining town is captured in the first minutes. Moses and his pal, Alphonse (Scott Kraft and Mark Daneri), are slumped in their chairs in a bar run by a babbling wacko whose head is full of Mafia conspiracies and John Wayne triumphs (Harvey Perr). When Moses stirs to talk about his non-mining entrepreneurial plans, we know all will be for nought.

We also know that we’re in the presence of (what is at least now) an unimaginative, derivative voice, treading ungently through O’Neill and Miller territory. The bar is where the town’s lost lives commiserate and dream (O’Neill). Moses’ family, with Lynn Carlson’s wife Mary and Lana Kitto as daughter Alexandra, is where business hopes and personal realities collide (Miller). Only in a last, frenzied monologue by Moses does Palace’s language rise above the ordinary. Hopelessness, as John Steppling has demonstrated at the Cast, demands some style.

A further burden is the miscasting of Perr, who will never convince us as a Western redneck.

At 800 El Centro Ave., Tuesdays, Wednesdays, 8 p.m., until March 8. Tickets: $10; (213) 462-0265.

‘Hacking New York’

The worst thing that can be said for Johnnie Morello’s memoir of his taxi driving days, “Hacking New York,” at the Long Beach Studio Theatre, is that it makes TV’s “Taxi,” seem credible.

“Taxi” never made any bid for credibility, but it could have been furiously funny, abetted by a natural comic subject. Morello’s comedy never gets out of the garage.

Morello first used the show’s incidents (lots of hookers, crazy people, insecure fellow workers) when he was a stand-up comedian. What he hasn’t done in the transition to play form is make his driver more than weakly caustic.

Morello (who also directed, another tactical mistake) matches this with a passive performance. The competent if uninspired cast spins around him in a myriad of multiple roles, and designer John Parker’s stripped-down cab suggests an exposed capsule in a dangerous universe. Lighting cues, though, are regularly missed, and Morello’s slide projections become a grating, busy, poorly coordinated distraction. Above all, the theatrics are fatally undercut by the relentless depiction of women as whores, bimbos or bitches.

Gary Joe Thompson evokes the play’s only chilling dramatic moment--a climax that won’t be revealed, but which suggests what kind of play “Hacking New York” could be, were it a play at all.

At 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach, tonight and Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Sunday. Tickets: $8-$9; (213) 494-1616.