I’ve often urged LA theater companies to try harder to find LA-oriented scripts. As LA’s largest and most important theater company, Center Theatre Group has borne the brunt of much of my criticism along these lines. CTG pledges to present LA stories in a statement on its own web site but seldom manages to find any.

Right now two small theaters are presenting exemplary plays that are very different but could hardly be more LA-oriented. In fact, they examine subcultures within LA in almost inside-baseball detail, with references that won’t mean as much outside LA as they do here.

The Temperamentals tells an inspirational story from LA’s history, while Girls Talk is a less-than-inspirational comedy about what’s happening right now in certain West Side precincts. Even though both of them have their LA-specific, microscopic moments, they address larger themes as well. These themes could resonate outside LA, especially in the case of The Temperamentals, which has already had two productions in New York (Off-Off-Broadway in 2009, Off-Broadway in 2010). But I primarily want to discuss their LA-ness.

Erich Bergen, Dennis Christopher iN THE TEMPERAMENTALS.

Produced by the Blank Theatre at its 2nd Stage on Santa Monica Boulevard, The Temperamentals tells the story of the formation of the Mattachine Society, the pioneering gay rights group, in the early ‘50s, primarily in Silver Lake. And it concludes by relating what happened to the group’s founding fathers over ensuing decades.

In that last part of the play, we learn that one of the Mattachine founders, Chuck Rowland, later founded LA’s primary gay-specific theater company, the Celebration Theatre. Offhand, I can’t recall any other moment when I’ve heard a historical reference to one LA theater company within a production by another LA theater company. Both theaters are on Santa Monica Boulevard, about a half-mile apart.

The question arises of why the LA premiere isn’t at the Celebration. That company’s artistic director Michael Shepperd says Celebration tried to get the rights, and at one point “I thought we were a shoo-in,” given the play’s mention of the Celebration. But Blank’s founding artistic director Daniel Henning beat him to the punch.

“If it weren’t us, I’m glad he got it,” Shepperd adds, especially because the director of the Blank production is Michael Matthews, Shepperd’s predecessor at the Celebration and still a frequent director there (including the recent Take Me Out). “Anytime Michael works, I’m happy to watch,” Shepperd says. (However, Shepperd’s current acting assignment in La Mirada Theatre’s Little Shop of Horrors will prevent him from seeing Temperamentals until later in the run.)

Shepperd and Henning both acknowledge that neither company considered a co-production with the other. But in an age of limited financial resources, co-productions should happen more often, Shepperd says. A co-production would have been an idea worth exploring, although I’ve got to admit that in this case, the theaters are perhaps are too close to each other to justify the confidence that a co-production would have drawn two disparate audiences.

Of course the question also arises of why the LA premiere isn’t at one of the LA theaters above the 99-seat level, where the royalties for the rights holders (and the potential audiences) would have been larger. Center Theatre Group and the Geffen Playhouse usually are first and second in line for the LA rights to plays that have been in New York – and the Geffen presumably has a relationship with Temperamentals playwright Jon Marans, as it produced the LA premiere of his most famous play, Old Wicked Songs. Why didn’t one of these companies scoop up the LA rights to this LA-centric play?

But enough speculation – the fact is that The Temperamentals is in very good hands at the Blank. Dennis Christopher is endearingly scrappy as Harry Hay, who evolves from a married suit-and-tie guy into the leader whose previous Communist affiliations eventually torpedo his own Mattachine movement into, by play’s end, a Radical Faerie. Erich Bergen is suave and subtle as Hay’s sometime lover and later-famous fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. The other actors play several roles, with Mark Shunock as the aforementioned Rowland and as Vincente Minnelli, John Tartaglia as the most “out there” of the founding fathers and Patrick Scott Lewis as the group’s blue-collar convert.

Marans’ writing engagingly balances the docu- with the -drama. And the intimacy of the theater and Kurt Boetcher’s set design, which lends a back-alley atmosphere to the entire space, suggest the covert atmosphere of gay LA during that era. It’s too bad that two nearby and recent productions that also examined homophobia in the post-WWII era, The Sonneteer and The Young Man From Atlanta, aren’t still around (Atlanta just closed last weekend) – anyone who was depressed by those plays might have found a ray of hope in The Temperamentals.

There aren’t many rays of hope in Girls Talk, at the Lee Strasberg Theatre. But theater audiences are often willing to accept a bleak perspective as long as the play makes them laugh – witness the current God of Carnage, at the Ahmanson. Well, Girls Talk generates much of that same sense of painful hilarity. In both plays, we see supposedly responsible adults devolving into behavior that is no more exalted than the tantrums of their own children. The disputes don’t get as physical in Girls Talk as they do in God of Carnage, but they’re every bit as toxic.

While God of Carnage is set in Brooklyn among two couples, Girls Talk is set in Brentwood among a group of five women. Three of them are moms at the same synagogue pre-school, though only two of those three are actually Jewish.

The extreme LA specificity of Girls Talk permeates the play. The local references that held the most personal meaning for me were a few wisecracks about an organization called RIE – which in the play stands for Raising Infant Educarers but in real LA stands for Resources for Infant Educarers. As someone who had enjoyable experiences with the real-life RIE when my own daughter was an infant, I could have taken offense at playwright Roger Kumble’s apparent jibes aimed in its direction, but then his jibes go every which way. He has a wonderful ability to undermine his own characters’ pretensions, so everyone looks somewhat foolish as well as somewhat righteous. Somehow I doubt that he intends for us to hold RIE responsible for the obnoxious behavior of the character who advocates its principles.

I saw Girls Talk a few weeks after it opened – and at the first performance since its star attraction Brooke Shields left the pivotal role of Lori, a former Hollywood screenwriter who’s now feeling trapped and out of her league in the land of stay-at-home moms. So I’m happy to report that Andrea Savage, who’s now in the role, handles Lori’s rampant insecurities convincingly, without conveying any sense of insecurity about her own ability to play Lori. Likewise, Jamie Denbo, who’s new in the role of Lori’s former screenwriting partner, the childless and unattached Claire, flings the acerbic quips around the stage like a latter-day Dorothy Parker.

The Temperamentals, Blank Theatre at 2^nd Stage, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thur-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Closes May 22. 323-661-9827. www.TheBlank.com.

Girls Talk, Lee Strasberg Theatre, 7936 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Thur-Sat 8 pm, Sun 7 pm. 800-595-4849. www.tix.com.

Temperamentals photo by Greg Gorman.