STAGE REVIEW : ‘Museum’ Skewers the Art World

“Culture, as we know it, is on the way out,” laments an art patron in Tina Howe’s unusual comedy “Museum,” an amusing look at an art gallery and the quirky characters who pass through it.

Staged by the Hollywood Repertory Company at Cole Place, a small sound stage comfortably adapted into a theater, the production comes along just at the point that L.A.’s public museums are being threatened with severe cutbacks. While the play is a whimsical observation about some high- and low-minded museum-goers attending the last day of an exhibit portentously called “The Broken Silence,” its clamorous undercurrents certainly impinge on the siege mentality facing real-life museums.

Although the show features 44 characters played by a cast of 19, the sense of place--and its effect on people--assumes the importance of the central character. (When Los Angeles Actors’ Theater presented it in 1976, artistic director Ralph Waite was hooked on plays about places, such as “The Kitchen” and “Museum.”)

Befitting a visit to an art museum, director Joshua Campbell creates a cool, pristine atmosphere of padding feet and murmuring voices that progressively builds in volume as decorum ever so lightly breaks down. A chief contributor to the grace under pressure is set designer Glenn Bradley, who humorously doubles as a prissy gallery guard reduced to a nervous wreck by play’s end.

Part satire and part human montage, the production intricately orchestrates the comings and goings of patrons, from elitists to commoners, each bent on a personal agenda.

Sometimes, weirdly enough, you get the impression the artworks are watching the patrons.

The ensemble is sharp, with distinctive portraits drawn by the French-speaking Erika Amato and wildly divergent characters depicted by Dean Regan.

None among this vanity fair is remotely alike: a striking woman (Cheryl Bradley) in bright African garb quietly shoots stills of furry reconstructions of animal and bird heads that actually are quite ugly. A quiet, mousy guy (Ed Francis), waiting until the right moment, quickly scribbles something (probably his initials) in the lower corner of a painting and dashes out the door. A pompous curator (Sonja Nall) babbles incomprehensibly to a fawning tour group.

A laughing lady (Terezia Monae) can’t look at the artwork without breaking into barely stifled giggles. And everyone takes a shot at stealing clothespins and pawing the costumed mannequins hanging on a clothesline creation in the museum’s much ballyhooed exhibit “Wet Dream Left Out to Dry.”

* “Museum,” Hollywood Repertory Company, 1433 Cole Place, Hollywood, Wednesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 11. $12. (213) 960-7957, (310) 854-4646. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.