`BEAN TEAM' LETS TEEN INSIGHT GROW.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

As long as there are flashlights, basements and adolescent boys, there'll always be shows like ``The Bean Team Anthology.''

Which is good. American theaters have become ponderous places of late. What many could use is a dose of self-mockery, a commodity this slight but resourceful three-man revue has in spades.

From its first appearance playing electric vacuum cleaner ``guitars,'' to a synchronized cat-toss and a ``sketchlet'' on ``Rabbi on the Run'' disposable yarmulkes, the Bean Team works hard to create the atmosphere of an impromptu frat party hosted by people auditioning for ``Saturday Night Live'' circa 1978.

Not coincidentally, the show has been billed as `` `Animal House' meets `Fame' while `Trainspotting' at `Cirque du Soleil.' '' That's a stretch, but it's fair to say that the Bean Team - Steve Bean (nee Levy), Steve Scionti and Kevin Black - reaches inspired altitudes with its ``laser show'' of lit cigarette butts and its deadpan performance of a pidgin-Germanic ``national anthem'' while dressed in black garbage bags.

You were expecting maybe Sophocles from an evening the grand finale of which involves pelting the audience with glow-in-the-dark Nerf balls?

``The Bean Team Anthology,'' playing through Aug. 23 at NoHo's Eclectic Company Theatre, starts out rather lumberingly as writer-performer Levy frames things with a long confessional monologue. Showing off an impressive repertory of cartoon voices and rubbery-faced tics, he recounts his Rhode Island Jewish upbringing and extra-curricular exploits at Carnegie-Mellon University drama school (where he dropped out after two frustrating years). He also tells us the show is dedicated to the memory of an ex-roommate who indulged in too much hardy partying, '70s style.

This lead-in is mostly standard stand-up fare, bereft of the kind of telling period detail (leisure suits, Ayatollah Khomeni or whatever) that could lend it wider significance. Yet, it bears the seeds of a savvy digression on the self-destructive hazards of nonconformity.

The show later hints at this theme in a mimed, strobe-lit enactment of a junkie's deadly rites, scored to David Bowie's ``Rock and Roll Suicide.'' Levy and director Roger Cox might consider adding more of these sobering and insightful counterpoints to the comedic keg party at hand.

Happily, at its best the Bean Team's sophomoric bonhomie has a way of making counterpoint beside the point.

THE FACTS

What: ``The Bean Team Anthology.''

Where: Eclectic Company Theatre, 5312 Laurel Canyon, North Hollywood.

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; through Aug. 23.

Tickets: $10. Call [phone].

Our rating: Two Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Kevin Black, left, Steve Levy and Steve Scionti master self-mockery in ``The Bean Team Anthology,'' at North Hollywood's Eclectic Company Theatre.