THERE'S LOTS OF LIFE IN AHMANSON'S STYLISH 'DEAD END'.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Critic

NICHOLAS MARTIN does great crowd control. He's not so shabby with one-on-one, up-close-and-personal interaction either. Which, let's face it, are mighty good traits to have when working with a sociopolitical screed masquerading as drama.

Currently playing at the Ahmanson Theatre is Martin's production of the Sidney Kingsley Depression tome, ``Dead End,'' a play with an important social history (it helped spur the Roosevelt administration into passing a housing bill) and staging challenges so off the charts that anyone without Ahmanson-like resources would be foolish to touch it. As it happens, Martin's got the goods at his disposal: the scenery, the music, a better-than-average cast and a fresh-faced collection of Dead End Kids to give Kingsley's drama a steady electrical current. Self-consciously relevant theater has rarely looked so good.

Indeed, with these toys on display, it's near impossible to avoid getting swept into the bustle. From practically the first second, someone or something is headed down the walkway bisecting the Lower East Side tenements and the toney River House apartments. Kids are pitching pennies or tossing a ball; cops stroll a usually quiet beat, the rich are headed - how very inconvenient! - to the back entrance of their apartments and the street toughs known as the Dead End Kids (later the Bowery Boys) are flinging themselves in and out of the East River, periodically drying themselves off to raise a little hell.

In addition to an unseen pool downstage that doubles as the river, James Noone's richly detailed set piles buildings with fire escapes, broken windows, garbage cans and clotheslines. Here, indeed, is life both swanky and desolate. Neighborhood Dead End-ers - unnamed and unspeaking - peer down from a third-story landing or from a River House terrace. In Martin's cast of 42, everyone has a job to do, a persona to create.

On this particular day in 1931, Baby-Face Martin (played by Jeremy Sisto), an on-the-lam gangster with a reward on his head, has returned to the neighborhood to look up his mother and an old flame. Along the docks, Gimpty (Tom Everett Scott), a crippled architect, is trying to coax a kept woman (Sarah Hudnut) into giving up her life of privilege and cashing in with him. And Tommy (Ricky Ullman), the leader of the Dead End Kids, gets into more trouble than he bargains for, much to the despair of Drina (Kathryn Hahn), his hard-working, labor-organizing sister.

The general message: Look at what a hardscrabble life here has done/is doing to our boys. Get them out at any cost! We hear it from Drina, from Gimpty, from practically anybody who opens his mouth.

Those boys, by the way, are a winning assemblage. With their shredded clothes (splendid work by costumer Michael Krass) and smooth, bantering dynamics, Ullman, Sam Murphy, Greg Roman, Trevor Peterson, Adam Rose and, later, Josh Sussman create a kind of life force that gives ``Dead End'' what little plot strength it possesses. Kingsley clearly knew these kids. Martin's production - bustling and crowded though it frequently is - allows us to know them, too. And sometimes, yes, even to care.

Even on an eventful and hectic day, the street manages to empty for adult encounters. She possesses little more than a cameo, but Joyce Van Patten is shockingly good as the gangster's ma, none too thrilled to see her Baby-Face. Pamela Gray, as Baby-Face's soiled doxie, Francey, packs her encounter with Sisto with equal force.

Sisto, so frighteningly good as the homophobic pitcher in ``Take Me Out'' at the Geffen, does very different work here. He's playing a gangster with all the money and dames he can stomach and such a compromised sense of self-worth (thanks for that, dead-end life) that he's now counseling the next generation of toughs how to cheat in their street battles. Pathetic rather than terrifying, Sisto employs a stammer and a general air of dented cocksureness. It's a winning performance.

Would that Sisto, Van Patten and the boys could be transported into all future productions of ``Dead End,'' a play that - for all its relevance - tips its reform-minded agenda at every opportunity. Without the Martin treatment, I suspect the play would be nearly unbearable. With it, there is most definitely life in the Ahmanson's ``Dead End.''

Evan Henerson, [phone]

evan.henerson(at)dailynews.com

DEAD END - Three stars

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; through Oct. 16.

Tickets: $20 to $75. Call [phone].

In a nutshell: Dated, nutritional, but also watchable.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

The young residents of New York's Lower East Side tenements - and the production's sets - are the stars of ``Dead End,'' at the Ahmanson Theatre through Oct. 16.