‘A Fairy Tale’ Gets Lost in the Woods

An amusing but undisciplined bagatelle, “A Fairy Tale” at the Actors’ Gang feels like a Hope and Crosby road picture sent on an abrupt detour through the looking glass. Loosely based on “Hansel and Gretel,” this two-person play features Daniel T. Parker and Chris Wells as gay brothers casting desperately about for some direction, not only through the woods where they have been abandoned, but through the even pricklier thickets of their youthful sexual confusion.

Parker, Wells and director Tracy Young co-wrote the piece, a jumble of traditional tales, Broadway musical medleys, in-your-face sexual unorthodoxy and outright burlesque. It may well be a case of too many cooks spoiling the Freudian stew. Despite Young’s rigorous staging and the rip-roaring performances of the two leads, the overall tone is wildly uneven, a self-indulgent mishmash that never settles down into a coherent theme.

The melange is most palatable when it is most purely goofy: Parker and Wells, who play all the roles, including a Joan Crawford-esque stepmother (Parker) and a hilariously reluctant witch (Wells), are nonstop dynamos who sprint through the proceedings like deranged clowns on methamphetamines, garnering boffo laughs along the way. In the context of the show’s general lightheartedness, its outre sexual scenes seem grossly out of place, particularly a grim little interlude of pederastic incest that is completely extraneous to the story. A masturbation scene and an incident of casual sex in a public park are also strikingly gratuitous.

Rand Ryan’s lighting, Ken Roht’s choreography and Steven Argila’s musical arrangements all set the stage for the magic that the play only intermittently supplies. By far the most dazzling element of the evening is Robert A. Prior’s set, a glistening dreamscape in which odd little curios and found objects, all painted in the same silvery tones, festoon the stage like Spanish moss. The creative head behind the Fabulous Monsters, whose recent “Voluptuous Madness” at Highways had far too short a run, Prior, who also designed costumes, once again does the innovative work for which he is becoming justly celebrated.

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* “A Fairy Tale,” Actors’ Gang, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 30. $12-$15. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.