`ALL IN THE TIMING' A CLEVER SIX-PACK.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

You order soup and the waitress brings you a cheese steak. You try to buy the New York Daily News and all you can find is the Inquirer.

Obviously, you're trapped in a Philadelphia. Not the big Eastern city itself, mind you, but an absurdist black hole where everyone does the exact opposite of what you'd expect, and ``if you want something, they're not going to have it.''

Al (Tom McGowan) explains this looking-glass logic to his anxious friend Mark (Arnie Burton) in ``The Philadelphia,'' one of the six skits that make up David Ives' ludicrously funny evening of literate comedy, ``All in the Timing.''

Whatever state of mind you're in - a Philadelphia, a Los Angeles, even a Cleveland - a trip to the Geffen Playhouse this month will be the cultural equivalent of a mental-health day.

If you've seen Ives' work before, you're aware he's an ambidextrous talent, capable of penning farcical humor with his right hand while summoning deeper reflections with his left.

Both those talents come into play in several of these vignettes, including one in which a kinetic instructor (Burton) offers a stuttering young woman (Kimberly Williams) lessons in Unamanda, ``da linkwa Looniversahl'' (that's universal language to you).

Sounding like pidgin Yiddish by way of Dr. Seuss, Unamanda features such handy phrases as,``Belljar, frau-ling, Harvard U?'' The eager-to-learn pupil proves so adept at mastering this pop esperanto that, by skit's end, she and her teacher have weathered an emotional crisis and replaced their nonsense language with the mutual tongue of romance. Though a hair overlong, it's an imaginative bit of lunacy.

``The Universal Language'' follows ``Words, Words, Words,'' a lively riff on the old saw that if you sat three chimps down at typewriters, eventually they'd bang out ``Hamlet.'' Here, the disgruntled primates Milton (McGowan), Swift (Burton again) and Kafka (Clea Lewis) are cleverly conceived as having the personalities of harried Hollywood hack writers, trying to appease a godlike Columbia University researcher.

``Not even a story conference!'' one grumbles between peeling a banana, swinging on a tire and, finally, tapping out a few lines that sound suspiciously like ``Paradise Lost.''

Ives invites us to laugh at the chimps' predicament and, by analogy, our own. If these baffled apes are mere blips in the Darwinian cosmos, can humans be much better off? Though Ives' script is virtually yawn-proof, director John Rando and his ensemble of five (Jim Fyfe is the other) deserve plenty of credit for making this undemanding evening pass so pleasurably.

At their best, the vignettes have the immediacy of improv comedy with just enough intellectual ballast. Happily, Ives would rather be funny than erudite, as he demonstrates with his spot-on parody of a Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera, complete with cryptic dialogue, hyper-stylized choreography and bemused performers who pause to ask the audience, ``Do you understand this? 'Cause we don't either.''

Though it would be a mistake to take this stuff too seriously, you sense a certain profundity lurking behind Ives' facile facade. ``All in the Timing'' buzzes with `what if's?' about the nature of existence and the crucial role that accidents and serendipity play in the grand scheme of things.

Take the concluding skit, ``Variations on the Death of Trotsky,'' a cerebral piece of vaudeville that employs a version of the word's oldest sight gag, the arrow-through-the-head routine.

Ives envisions the great Soviet statesman and his wife (Lewis) as a sitcom couple: Trotsky, his head impaled with a mountain climber's ax (not an icepick), is literally at pains to explain why he's still alive on Aug. 21, 1940 - thirty-six hours after a Spanish communist gardener drove the deadly implement into his skull.

``Maybe a hat would cover the handle, you know those cute little alpine hats?'' Mrs. Trotsky says helpfully.

The world Ives surveys turns on bizarre coincidences and freak events - an assassin's blow, a lover's blurted confession, an innocent bite of the apple of knowledge. In the end, though, Ives' Marxian sensibilities are closer to Groucho's than Karl's. He gooses your mind silly.

THE FACTS

What: ``All in the Timing.''

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through June 28.

Tickets: $27.50 to $37.50. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Arnie Burton tutors Kimberly Williams in the nonsensical language of Unamunda in a skit from ``All in the Timing'' at the Geffen Playhouse.