A knacker is a person who buys worn-out horses and slaughters them for dog food, which might help make clear that The Knacker's ABC is about the futility of war, the utility of family, and the indubitability of people in general. The playwright, Boris Vian, attacked initially for his anti-militarist writings, swore that all he wanted to do was "...make people laugh about something that was not funny—war." His play is "an anarchist vaudeville," an unknowing precursor of the absurdist theatre practiced by Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Albee, and Dürrenmatt, in which weird, disengaged people run on and off the stage, fleeing from nowhere to nowhere, basically interchangeable in their comparative anonymity and apparent lunacy.
The play, written in 1946, two years after the liberation of France, takes place in Normandy around the time the Americans are landing to take out the Germans, who've occupied the town of Arromanches for four years. Germans, Free French, Americans, a female Soviet soldier (the Knacker's third daughter, Lisa Soloway in a Miss Soviet Union bikini top and army boots), and even a lone Japanese kamikaze pilot are all fodder for Vian's satirical big guns. Only the Brits aren't present because, as one character mentions in reference to Dunkirk, "in these parts, one gets off a boat, not on."
Uppermost in the Knacker's (Bart Tangredi) agenda is his urgent need to stop the silly war and get his far-flung family home for a conference on whether his oldest daughter, Marie (Amy Christine Grant), is or is not pregnant, and should or should not marry Heinz Schnittermach (Martin Bedoian), a German soldier she's been living with for the past four years. In a chaotic mishmash of family dysfunction, incestual innuendo, odorous knacker jokes, loony neighbors, strip poker, meaningless rhetoric, and sexual aggression by the younger daughter, also Marie (Andrea Fears), waged against anyone in any kind of uniform, the generic soldiers come and go, while bullets fly, bombs explode, and shells rain on the battered town. If there is a moral here, it's that families put far more energy and antagonism into their fighting than armies do.
Director Ron West, lumbered with a huge cast, manages to keep the mayhem mostly under control, although the frenzy level tends to question the validity of the fairly obvious natural humor, which sometimes gets lost amid the terminally quirky, twitchy, and high-decibel performances—particularly in the case of Hepburn Jamieson as the Neighbor and Amy Watt as Marie, the Knacker's wife. Tangredi hues closest to playing farce as it should be played—the more seriously, the funnier. The words of a playwright who believed in the power of words and the exclusivity of language, whose craft and poetry Jean Cocteau described as "vocal ballet," might quiver under this company's warlike onslaught on his dialogue and yell: "Into the knacker's pit with the lot of you!"
Aaron Harper's ingenious set design, Usha Chohan's costume design, Dan Reed's lighting design, Peter Carlstadt's sound design, and Adrian Sparks and Cap Parnell's special effects are supremely effective. (And no credit for the person who has to clean up the stage after every performance.)
"The Knacker's ABC," presented by and at the Open Fist Theatre Company, 1625 N. La Brea Avenue., Hollywood. Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 7 p.m. Jan. 19-Feb. 24. $15. (323) 882-6912.