Playwright Adrian Truss' Tale of the Scorpion is a charming and bracingly imaginative comedy that proves, once again, that what audiences love is a play within a play. Depression-era, penny-dreadful pulp-fiction writer Lester (Cooper Thornton) returns from a vacation to discover that his editor wants three full-length novels within three days. Without passing Go, Lester hits his three typewriters, dishing up a set of pulp stories, which are then played out onstage. In one, intrepid Flash Gordon-esque hero Captain Tomorrow (an amusingly acrobatic Jay Boyer) saves the President (Thornton) from diabolical Chinese super-villain Lon Go-Ti (Anthony Cistaro). Meanwhile secret agent L-7 (Matt Bushell) fights Nazi creep Baron Von Gott-Fokker (Wesley Mann). And sinister loner The Scorpion (Taylor Negron) nearly meets his match in the person of The Black Angel, a sultry femme fatale (Gayla Goehl). However, as Lester's inevitable burnout sets in, the three story threads come to life, Pirandello-like, and they start to meld into one another, with amiably surreal results.
Truss' comedy is undeniably lightweight, but director Cistaro's staging, which mixes camp and affection for the material's pulpy origins, is infectious. The pacing of the first few scenes lags somewhat, but as soon as the pulp stories kick in, the show crackles with energy and wonderfully precise comic timing. In this sort of show, it's the comic-book-style villains who have the most opportunities to shine, and the anti-heroic performers ham it up with all the amiable gusto of thriller archetypes. Goehl steals the stage with her hissing, reptilian Black Angel, while Negron's ghoulish Scorpion is appealingly sinister. Boyer's comically bland Captain Tomorrow and Thornton's controlled, tightly wired Lester are also hilariously vivid comic turns.
Also on the bill is Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez's bizarre tour-de-force Sabotage, a collection of tangentially connected, freewheeling gags and sketches that are crisply performed yet almost entirely nonsensical. Talented and endearingly charismatic, Allen and Chavez, a pair of 25-year-old performance artists, zip up and down the stage, one moment portraying a pair of Monty Python-ish upper-class twits, the next wriggling on the floor like a pair of tomcats in heat. In one scene, Chavez plays a time traveler who accidentally turns a man into a dinosaur. In another, Allen pretends to be a little girl who believes her father is the tooth fairy and tries to give him a tooth the size of a moose's head.
This is the sort of bizarre show that seems created entirely by improv, influenced in equal parts by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Gary Larson's The Far Side. Yet the sketches and gags have a random, internally disjointed, game-of-make-believe quality that is genuinely imaginative but wears quickly. And although Chavez and Allen are energetic, bubbly, and talented—with a wonderful onstage partnership that's a pleasure to watch on its own terms—the show is ultimately contentless.
"Tale of the Scorpion" and "Sabotage," part of Smash Comedy Hits from the Canadian Fringe, presented by the Story Syndicate at the Stella Adler Theatre, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. Jan. 17-Feb. 16. $16-40. (818) 585-8774.