EL PORTAL'S 'CRAPS' JUST FULL OF ITSELF.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Critic

OK, we give. You can uncover the hidden cameras now. Good one, and boy were we fooled!

This was a gag, right? That effort on the El Portal Center for the Arts' main stage was supposed to be appalling. Somebody out there needs footage of a shocked and horrified audience. We're going to be spliced into someone's remake of ``The Producers'' watching the opening number of ``Springtime for Hitler,'' no?

Because if ``Shooting Craps'' is really what the El Portal is trying to pass off as entertainment in this, its second season as the Valley's largest professional house, then folks have got some serious 'splaining to do.

Tom Dulack, for a start.

The author of the hit ``Breaking Legs'' is both the creator of this desperately unfunny piece of nonsense and, as its director, the assembler of a cast so lifeless and inept that the play's considerable weaknesses are highlighted.

Not only were the actors reciting slop, on opening night they looked under-rehearsed. Lines were fluffed, pacing dragged and microphones frequently made it sound like the action was taking place in an echo chamber. More than a mere dramatic misfire, this production feels like bad community theater.

Even the usually reliable Harold Gould - the production's marquee name - couldn't rise above the carnage. How could he? The man is playing a small-town bookie with mafioso connections and the IQ of a rotting summer squash. No wonder he looks so lost.

Equally deserving of blame is the El Portal brain trust who deemed ``Shooting Craps'' fit for human consumption. Are Valley audiences thought to be so starved for ``warm family humor'' that we're expected to chow down on third-rate stereotypes lampooning Italian-Americans, Jews and American Indians? The stupidity of ``Shooting Craps'' is an insult to any theater-going audience. At $30 to $45 per ticket, we deserve better. Heaven knows how this story looked in script form. There may well be a germ of an idea about a mayoral candidate whose mobbed-up family goes to desperate lengths to keep the campaign promise she should never have made. But you'd need a lot more cynicism or smarter humor to make it play, not bad wigs and jokes about soup bones. You also need characters to root for, or characters who are unapologetically immoral.

Instead, Dulack gives us a rogue's gallery of buffoons. Are we to believe that Joanna Caruso, the unmarried mayor of a small New England mill town (played by Sonja Alarr), doesn't know about her family's shady doings, or that she simply chooses to ignore them? Down in the polls, but determined to run a clean re-election campaign, she keeps returning the satchel full of money (a ``synonymous donation'') to her disbelieving but good-hearted Uncle Carmine (Gould, who should fire his agent). She's also full of sanctimonious, Jimmy Stewart-esque speeches to Clayton Robinson (Larry Anderson), the visiting FBI agent who comes knocking on Uncle Carmine's door asking embarrassing questions.

Joanna needs an Indian gaming casino, but she's faced with a shortage of Indians. So Uncle Carmine taps a Chicago cousin, who dispatches the hash-smoking, ``oy vey''-spouting Chief Buffalo Calf (Alan Altshuld) to try to put one over on the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As agent Robinson quickly discovers, the chief is as false as fool's gold with a rap sheet several miles long. Unfazed, Uncle Carmine figures there are ways of getting the deal done. He'll just offer Robinson ``the booze or the prostitutes. One or the other.''

That's the way people think in this play. No more shrewd is Carmine's mother Lena (Laura James), an ancient spitfire whose old-country ways require her to add an extra syllable to every other word (``You gonna starv-a to death''; ``she's a like-a the rock''). James plays her as Estelle Getty on the ``Golden Girls'' crossed with an angry wolverine. Another functionless character whose purpose is only to elicit low-key humor.

Underneath all this is the contention that everything that takes place is happening because the Carusos are such a good-hearted, tight-knit, family. In other words, the family that bribes together, attracts tribes together.

A heart-warming notion? Hardly. It's a bogus, halaked and hollow notion. Like everything else in this production.

``SHOOTING CRAPS''

Where: El Portal Center for the Arts, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday; through Feb. 25.

Tickets: $30 to $45. Call [phone].

Our rating: Zero stars

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Photo:

Harold Gould, left, and Laura James star in ``Shooting Craps'' at the El Portal.