Seeing Two Sides of One-Man Shows

At $3 a ticket, Michael McDonald’s one-man show at the Groundling Theatre is your low-cost leader for entertainment in Los Angeles.

Half stand-up act, half confessional one-man show, “Orange County and the Animal Kingdom” offers some focused and well observed stories from McDonald’s growing-up years and then a more belabored story from his young adult life in which he leaves the bank loan business to become an actor. The evening is held together by a recurring metaphor about a wildebeest.

McDonald is wildebeest-like himself, tall and seemingly not entirely in command of his lanky limbs. His long-lashed eyes shine with joy or mania; it’s sometimes hard to tell which. He combines benevolence with a hint of madness, a quality that has made him a standout in the current Groundling company.

Beginning with a tale about sticking his foot irreversibly into his mouth during a recent audition, McDonald recalls the moment when he first recognized his capacity for self-destruction. It happened when, as a small boy in the relative calm of Fullerton, he watched a wildebeest episode on the TV show “Animal Kingdom.”

Young Michael is glued to the screen as the thirsty wildebeests trot down to their watering hole only to find that the spot is brimming with hungry alligators. The wildebeests back off, their hooves nervously sifting the mud. One wildebeest, who is too thirsty or defiant or dumb, just has to have that drink. He locks eyes with a gator. The rest happens very quickly.

McDonald identifies intensely with that wildebeest. He especially fixates on the moment when the wildebeest and the gator lock eyes, a good leitmotif that he cites a little too frequently through the rest of the evening. His crowning story, about a gang of foreign neighbors who terrify him, ends with him calling his parents to come to rescue him, which they do. This story defies every rule about self-reliance being essential to epiphany and makes McDonald look more immature than he probably intends.

But, in his ticket price, McDonald seems to acknowledge that he’s only just figuring out what he’s doing, and watching him figure it out certainly has its pleasures. At the end of the evening, almost inexplicably, he reads one of those Christmas letters that non-writers send to all of their friends and relatives, full of news of the concluding year.

This letter is a hilarious bit of “found comedy,” and it made me laugh until I covered my face and cried. Written by a friend of McDonald’s mother, the letter relates all of the terrible and most mundane things that happened to her family in a year, all mixed together as if there was no reason to distinguish one experience from another. It reached heights of absurdity the writer never dreamed she was achieving.

If McDonald’s stab at the one-man format succeeds, it’s largely because his childhood stories are vivid and specific.

A few blocks away at the Acme Theatre, Pat Hazell performs another one-man show about growing up, also only on Thursday nights. Hazell was a writer and frequent opening act for Jerry Seinfeld, and he shares the comedian’s penchant for mining minutiae.

In his show, “The Wonder Bread Years,” he makes fetishes of the brand names that littered baby boomer childhoods, from Etch-A-Sketch to Manwich to a common fly swatter. “My job,” he tells us, “is to take you back to the time when life was ‘Wake up, play, eat and go to bed.’ ”

Hazell is a funny man, there’s no mistake. But, despite a prologue and coda that ask us to remember the wonder we felt as children, this is essentially a stand-up routine, relentlessly jokey and impersonal.

He tries to make poetry out of shared childhood totems but relies much too heavily on the mere mention of them to signal wonder. He does no interpretive work. “All we have is our memory to rekindle the power of the past,” he says. And you’ll have to use it too.

* “Orange County and the Animal Kingdom,” Groundling Theatre, 7307 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, Thursdays, 10 p.m. Ends July 3. $3. (213) 934-4747. Running time: 80 minutes.

* “The Wonder Bread Years,” Acme Comedy Theatre, 135 N. La Brea Ave., Thursdays, 8 p.m. Ends July 31. $10. (213) 525-0202. Running time: 80 minutes.