Visuals Not Point of ‘Sounds in the Dark’

Viewers may not see the point of “Sounds in the Dark,” now at Actors’ Gang in Hollywood. There’s very little to see, in fact, because the stage is often completely dark.

But what gleaming beacons those exit signs are.

In charitable terms, this show could be described as an aural experiment. Or, as the company puts it, “a collection of short stories of the macabre and supernatural all told through the use of voice, sound, music and the imagination.”

Imagination on the part of the audience, maybe. Director Keythe Farley has thrown together a hodgepodge of low-rent Grand Guignol: a sorcerer’s Faustian tale, an inscrutable romance between a drifter and a blind woman, and a grippingly told (though strangely anticlimactic) memoir of a roadside tourist trap.

The main problem is that the aptly titled “Sounds in the Dark” lacks almost any kind of visual dramatization, long thought to be a staple of live theater. Instead, audience members sit and listen to long monologues and a series of impressive sonic effects (cranked out over a state-of-the-art sound system). The result is both unusual and uninteresting, especially since these vignettes are not even spoken in a way that commands attention.

Sounds like a shot in the dark.

* “Sounds in the Dark,” Actors’ Gang, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Tonight, Sunday, Thursday and July 28, 8 p.m. Ends July 28. $10. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.