STAGE REVIEWS : OPEN FESTIVAL : The Hip Variety of Scrap Theatre

The Mondrian Hotel’s Jazz Lounge is too chic for an anarchic group like Scrap Theatre. Its Saturday-night show amounted to a hip variety act--monologues, some music interludes, a few dialogues. Not everything was disposable.

Certainly not the impassioned actors, whether it was Michael Dellafemina as a white jazzman strung out on heroin, Leonna Small as a woman who tried to shoot down malathion-spraying copters, Mark Hannah’s surreal drag version of a fallen actress, as well as his dreamer who goes inside a Van Gogh painting and beyond, or Charles Bailey-Gates as an actor playing out his dream and those of his fellow, absent actresses.

Dialogues about an artist meeting God to see how She works, Hollywood power brokers, and a gay man visited by the ghost of his lover were less nutty than the monologues, but just as incomplete. The music breaks--Ken Warfield’s lame riffs on sax, guitarist-singer-songwriter Laura Robinson’s overly familiar folk-tinged love songs--seemed to be from a different show.

At Highland Grounds Coffeehouse, 742 N. Highland, on Thursday, 8 p.m., $10, and Sept. 13, 9 p.m., $3; (213) 466-1507. At Gardner Stage, 1509 N. Gardner, Sunday and Sept. 16, 8 p.m., $10; (213) 876-6043 or (213) 851-3516.