You Make Me Physically Ill and So Damned Heavenly Bound

It must be said, though without pleasure in the saying: This specious, spurious double bill, a sub–garage show turned vanity project by writer-director-actor Roger Mathey, is a contender for the single most inept offering that this reviewer has ever seen in a Los Angeles theater. Ever.

Patty Wonderly's "So Damned Heavenly Bound" serves as the curtain raiser, although this account of three sisters bickering over their deceased parents' effects is scarcely a curtain rod. Twenty minutes of remembered strife does not dramaturgy make, with acting-class showcase-night approaches to a single dolorous scene in search of a script. The best that can be said is, Malesa Farris, Rebecca Erwin, and Sundee Martineau, as the combative siblings, look like sisters. Angela Poncetta plays the plainspoken granddaughter.

After an ill-advised intermission, Mathey's "You Make Me Physically Ill" upends existing notions of how bad theater can be. Per Mathey's extensive program notes, his overstretched sketch, complete with sitcom laugh track, about a kindly schlub (game Karl Wade) who meets the outré family of his hoped-for girlfriend (chirpy Emily Tisler) is intended as an absurdist compression of a two-and-a-half-year relationship. Given the playwriting, um, technique on tap, the compression may have entailed a chain saw, and there's a vast difference between absurdist and just plain absurd.

For 90 minutes that feel like 90 years, a paroxysm of barn-broad, purposely taboo topics—incest, adultery, closeted homosexuality, ethnic stereotyping, bodily functions, ad nauseam—assaults the viewer while pretending at plot. Mathey beggars belief as the post–"Family Guy" paterfamilias, complete with repetitions of "Does your face hurt? It's killing me" between obscenities delivered with a grin and unspeakable bathroom visits that leave his shirt showing through his fly. Katie Aquino plays his pregnant eldest, Joshua Hensley her latent Jewish husband, Tracie McMahon his Stepford wife, and Amanda Castruita his Electra-complex love child. Claire Moles and Steve Garza portray the hero's best friends, Jacob Wolber his inamorata's perfect ex-beau. A few of them exhibit a measure of talent, someday destined for an actual play. Otherwise, the principal theatrical validity resides in the title, since "You Make Me Physically Ill" did exactly that.

Presented by Seat of Your Pants Productions at Elephant Theatre, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. Aug. 5-Sept. 10. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. (323) 960-7770. www.plays411.com/physicallyill.