UNCORKING POTENT BUKOWSKI TRIBUTE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Critic

The lowlife musings of Charles Bukowski have always inspired a certain voyeuristic pleasure. Reading Bukowski's bleary, beery prose offers the literary equivalent of slumming: Respectable middle-class folk can visit his mythical L.A. mean streets and spy on the wretched refuse therein without getting blood on their hands or stains on their souls.

Yet in ``Decline and Fall,'' its brisk adaptation of some of Bukowski's later fiction, the Shop Theatre Company admirably resists these cynical impulses. Playwrights Marty Parker and James Penner have come not to romanticize (or exploit) Bukowski but to revel in his bellicose humanity, his gruff empathy for the addicted and the unloved. Snappily directed by Todd Fraser and acted by a large cast of 17 in a spirit of jaunty debauchery, this string of blackly comic vignettes finds seedy dignity in the ritualized humiliations its characters endure.

``People are not good to each other. I don't ask them to be,'' says the Bukowski stand-in who narrates the show (Jack Shearer). That nonjudgmental worldview permeates the action as various hookers, gamblers, wanna-be screenwriters, psychotic pimps and lonely phone-sex customers pass before us, stoically shouldering the brutal blows life deals them. Most acquit themselves honestly, if not honorably.

``Decline and Fall'' centers loosely on a day in the life of a dead-end bar where Bud and Bud Lite are served and the regulars stumble in as soon as the flinty owner (John McKay) opens the door. The play turns funnier even as it grows progressively kinkier and uglier.

Its final sequence, involving a strange case of cannibalism performed by a sexual menage a trois, manages to shock without offending. Also quite effective is the sequence in which an outsider crashes a tribalistic L.A. bar and, in a frenzied burlesque of O'Neill's ``The Iceman Cometh,'' ends up as a sacrificial offering.

``Decline and Fall'' is strong at conveying Bukowski's punchy poetry (``strangers with faces like the backs of thumbtacks''). It's less persuasive when it attempts to turn its hero's savage, streetwise humor into a generalized indictment of Western civilization.

Altogether, it makes for a diverting and (pun intended) sobering evening.

The Facts

What: ``Decline and Fall.''

Where: Tamarind Theatre, 5919 Franklin Ave., Hollywood.

When: 8 p.m. today through Sunday.

Tickets: $17. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three Stars

CAPTION(S):

Photo

PHOTO Clement Blake, left, Dyanne DiRosario, John McKay and Jack Shearer co-star in the Shop Theatre Company production of ``Decline and Fall,'' at the Tamarind Theatre.