Stomach Contents 

Reviewed by Neal Weaver 
Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre 
Through March 25  

These three one-acts by Sharon Yablon are all set in the bleak Mojave Desert, and they share an equally bleak vision, albeit touched with fantasy and surrealism.

In The Comet Gazers we meet Lance and Renee, who fled to the desert when they could no longer afford to live in Los Angeles. Now Lance just sits in his front yard watching the sky, while Renee must stand because Lance is too stingy to provide another chair. They have a visitor, Carl, whose inherited wealth spares him the necessity of working, so he pursues a meaningless round of Hollywood parties and sexual encounters. Renee tells him, “If you’ve come out to the desert to kill yourself, don’t do it here.”

Tonight the Streets Are Ours is more mysterious. Glen (David Rubin) has brought a transgendered woman with him into the desert, but it’s not working out: he’s turned off by the fact that he can’t forget that his partner is a man, despite any restructuring. He encounters Toni (Jacqueline Besson), who seems to be some sort of local guide or community greeter. She tells him that “the dead have their highways. Only the living are lost.”

In Ice Machine, an old man (Robert Staccardo) has a strange encounter with a young boy (Jesse Fair) by the ice machine at a desert motel.

Yablon is an intelligent writer who shows us some interesting characters, and the actors do some nice work — but in the end, I don’t know what our take-away is meant to be, or what the title means. In television cop shows, stomach contents are usually analyzed to discover the cause of death. But who’s dead here — the characters, the playwright, the audience, or the society we live in? Your guess is as good as mine.

Thomas Chan provides the live musical accompaniment.

Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre, 4850 Lanker shim Blvd., North Hollywood. Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (818) 202-4120 or ZombieJoes.Tix.com. Running time: One hour with no intermission.