Los Angeles Theatre Center – where you can pretend you’re in prison. It’s the place for plays set in prisons.

Donte Wince, Mark Rolston and Cris D'Annunzio

Alliterative though this pitch is, it might not be the most appealing way to promote LATC. But with Los Angeles Poverty Department’s State of Incarceration last June and now a revival of Short Eyes, LATC’s smaller venues are where LA theatergoers can best approximate the experience of entering prison.

While State of Incarceration literally brought the audience into a simulated prison, Julian Acosta’s staging of Miguel Piñero’s Short Eyes gives us a fly-on-the-wall perspective on a heavily guarded room in a detention center in 1975. Geronimo Guzman’s set looks almost photorealistic, and the action takes place only a few feet away from everyone in the room.

In his program note, Acosta writes that the play is mostly about love, albeit love “that has been distorted, buoyed, buried, obliterated or otherwise affected by…life circumstances.”  Sorry, that doesn’t really ring true. Short Eyes is about hate and fear more than it’s about love. To emphasize “love” as its primary theme is precisely the kind of sentimental gesture that Piñero himself scrupulously avoided.

Jason Olazabal and Matias Ponce

Fortunately, Acosta has successfully avoided allowing his “love” concept to overpower and sentimentalize his production. He offers a brutal glimpse of a brutal world, with hardly any punches pulled. Yet his staging doesn’t become bogged down in the banality of brutality. The tension in the room explodes often, with crackling dramatic urgency.

The play follows what happens when a suspected child molester (Matthew Jaeger) is thrown into this holding cell along with three conspicuously segregated groups of more experienced prisoners – three blacks, three Puerto Ricans and one conspicuous white guy. Only one of the prisoners (David Santana) treats the newcomer, who is pejoratively nicknamed “short eyes,” with the slightest trace of civility. The new guy is so outnumbered – and so despised and maltreated by the staff as well as the prisoners – that the play virtually compels the audience to sympathize with him, despite some of his creepier memories of previous infractions.

Matthew Jaeger and Cris D'Annunzio

Piñero was himself a young ex-con when the play was first produced, so perhaps the blistering authenticity wasn’t all that surprising, but his ability to depict the plight of the despised title character is the mark of a surprisingly mature dramatic sensibility. The writing falters slightly near the ending, which feels a bit arbitrary, but it doesn’t invalidate the production’s overall impact.

Acosta has cast the play with older-than-expected actors in a couple key roles, with real benefits. Carl Crudup’s Ice and Mark Rolston’s Longshoe are keenly in touch with the desperation of men whose lives have been wasted for decades instead of mere years.

This is a co-production of Urban Theatre Movement, a young company whose work I had never seen, and the Latino Theater Company that operates LATC. It’s a promising collaboration.

Short Eyes, Los Angeles Theatre Center Theatre 4, 514 S. Spring St., LA. Thur-Sun 8 pm, Sun 7 pm. Closes Dec. 11. 866-811-4111. www.thelatc.org.

***All Short Eyes production photos by Federico Mata

Joanna Strapp in "Esther's Moustache"

Over the weekend, I finally caught up with two thoughtful comedies about assimilated American Jews re-discovering their roots. I’m sorry I waited so long – one of them actually closed yesterday – but on the other hand, it’s always interesting to encounter two plays about Jews at the same time that the blizzard of Christmas-related shows is beginning to obscure the rest of the theatrical landscape, as it will for the next few weeks. I’m also glad that neither of these productions is a Hanukkah play (Hanukkah doesn’t begin until Dec. 20 this year); instead, they’re amusing explorations of what it means to be Jewish in modern America.

The one that’s still playing is Laurel Ollstein’s Esther’s Moustache. Maddie (Joanna Strapp) is a young cartoonist who lives in LA’s Venice, close enough to the surf that we can hear the waves at times (John Zalewski is the sound designer). But Maddie never ventures into the water or anywhere else outside her apartment. She has retreated after her father committed suicide a year earlier. Her main companion is an imaginary friend – the flirty goddess (Mara Marini) who is the protagonist of her cartoons for Raunch magazine.

Joanna Strapp, Burt Grinstead, Mara Marini and Ellen Ratner

However, two initially contradictory characters are determined to bring Maddie out of her shell. First there is her grandmother Esther (Ellen Ratner, who played both a Jewish mother and a daughter in the ‘80s hit solo Personality, at the Odyssey), full of Old World attitudes and recipes. Then there is a young German man, Gerd (Burt Grinstead), who works for the company that picks up and delivers Maddie’s cartoons.

At first they appear to be on very different pages – Esther suspects Gerd of being a Nazi or at least the descendant of Nazis, and it turns out that his grandfather was indeed in Hitler Youth. But he is enchanted by Esther as well as by Maddie. Soon Gerd is on his way to becoming a Jew – much to the distress of Maddie and her goddess.

Perhaps intentionally, Esther’s Moustache has the light touch of a cartoon. We never really learn why Maddie’s father – and Esther’s son – killed himself, or how it is that Esther – who apparently fled pogroms instead of the Holocaust – is young enough to be Maddie’s grandmother, as opposed to her great-grandmother. Still, as a theatrical cartoon under Ollstein’s own direction, Esther’s Moustache makes its points with light-hearted flair.

Esther’s Moustache, studio/stage, 520 N. Western Ave., LA. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 5 pm. Closes Dec. 17. 323-960-7792. www.plays411.com/moustache.

***All Esther’s Moustache production photos by Michael Lamont

Karen Kalensky and Adam Korson in "The God of Isaac"

The similarly themed play that closed yesterday is James Sherman’s The God of Isaac, a 1985 play that the West Coast Jewish Theatre produced at the Pico Playhouse. In the original production in Chicago, where the play is set, Sherman himself played the central character of Isaac Adams, a Jewish journalist who is prompted to explore his Judaism by the late-‘70s threats by neo-Nazi groups of their plans to march through the heavily Jewish population of Skokie, Ill. Here that leading role was played by the disarming Adam Korson.

Isaac has married outside the faith – but his wife (Corryn Cummins), unlike Maddie’s new boyfriend in Esther’s Moustache – has no interest in anything Jewish. So Adam’s search for his roots is taken at some risk to his marriage. His search is also considerably more ambitious than Maddie’s, going far beyond tasting Jewish foods to having conversations with a Lubavitcher, a conservative rabbi, an Auschwitz survivor and Jewish Defense League protestors, plus reading the Torah and other books.

Adam Korson and Corryn Cummins

Of course his quest to discover what it is to be a Jew has so many possible answers that Adam is ultimately resigned to being satisfied only with the questioning itself, but his efforts make Sherman’s play somewhat more substantive than Ollstein’s.

At the same time, Sherman also maintains a briskly stylized comic tone, using two techniques. He places his supposedly “real” mother (Karen Kalensky) in the audience to offer acerbic commentary, until he eventually brings her up on stage when his initial stage concept of his mother doesn’t seem to be working out. And he interrupts the action with little parodies of well-known scenes from American culture – Huckleberry Finn, My Fair Lady, The Grapes of Wrath, On the Waterfront, The Wizard of Oz – re-written with interpolated Jewish content.

Under Darin Anthony’s direction, the production’s cylinders were firing full-blast on the closing weekend. For the final two weekends, Herb Jacobs – a former artistic director of West Coast Jewish Theatre – replaced Peter Van Norden in the roles of the rabbi/survivor/father, and he brought a commendable veracity to every sketchy role that he embodied.