QUESTIONABLE CASTING PUSHES `BENT' OFF TRACK.

Byline: Katherine Karlin Correspondent

MARTIN SHERMAN'S ``Bent'' deals with seldom-treated subject matter: the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The play examines this bleak chapter of history through Max, a hard-living, small-time operator in prewar Berlin who trades sex and drugs for favors and finances, and who, against all odds, discovers his strength and humanity after being interned at Dachau.

But miscasting hampers the Aislinn Productions staging. As Max, John Marzilli has craggy good looks, street toughs and the predatory smile of an alligator, but he simply lacks the oily charm and sexual allure Max uses to survive. An early scene in which he tries to hustle a much younger, much hunkier man for rent money defies logic, and when Max meets his foppish, bourgeois uncle (Richard Irving in a splendid miniature) the two men don't register as being from the same planet, let alone the same family.

Claudia Jaffee's direction presents other problems. The terse dialogue lies flat on the page, and the Nazi prison guards seem to have goose-stepped out of a Hollywood B-movie. Jaffee underestimates her audience by having the Nazis speak with cartoonish Col. Klink accents, while the prisoners - also Germans - sound more Brooklyn than Berlin. (We're supposed to relate to the prisoners - get it?) Kurt Boetcher's set design is suitably grim: Even the early Berlin scenes forebode disaster. And the sound by Cricket Myers enhances the tension.

But the production's brightest spot is an all-too-brief appearance by Geoffrey Dwyer as Greta, the amoral transvestite club-owner whose world is fast coming to a close. In addition to a haunting performance of an elegiac song, Dwyer gives us something memorable: the pulse of a desperate man clawing his way through the detritus.

Josh Gordon is Horst, Max's mensch-like fellow prisoner, and he has the hollow eyes of a camp detainee. Jon Cohn avoids easy stereotyping as Max's lover Rudy, but never seems to locate the heart of his character.

BENT - Two stars

Where: Deaf West Theatre, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday; through Aug. 21.

Tickets: $20. Call [phone] or visit www.plays411.com/bent.

In a nutshell: The production never overcomes the critical miscasting in the lead.