Lend an ear to Charlie Kaufman

"Hope Leaves the Theater" is a series of amusing exits out of various rabbit holes. The actors are the audience. They make fun of us. The actors are, at first, characters in a play. They make fun of them. They ride an elevator in a medical tower that goes on forever. They make fun of that. They step out of character, and they make fun of themselves.

They make fun of Charlie Kaufman. They make fun of Charlie Kaufman making fun of Charlie Kaufman making fun of them making fun of themselves making fun of us watching them making fun of themselves. They swim in a sea of self-referential asides. Sometimes it gets suffocatingly ironic. But sometimes it doesn't.

When he can stop looking at himself and looks around, Kaufman has an acute eye and ear. Here Hope Davis is the one with an existential crisis. She sits on stage, but she inhabits the audience. Her cellphone rings. It's the last straw for Streep, who is meant to be performing on stage. Streep throws her out of the hall. Davis sloshes home on the bus and through the rain. She has computer sex.

Streep would steal the show with her razor-sharp accents, her split-second change of characters, if Dinklage weren't just as good, if more subtle. The scene in the rain, with perfectly apt noirish music and inspired sound effects, folds the stage into the imagination. We see the actors but we don't. Then we see them, because they mischievously break the mood.

This is all a wonderful experiment, though one that doesn't go far enough. For Kaufman, a one-liner is thick taffy to be stretched as far as it will go. He fears fear. A master of rabbit holes he may be, but the direction he takes is always up. And he doesn't trust music enough.

These plays are billed as music theater. Burwell is a talented composer with a knack for creating atmosphere, and he does that very well here. He also has a wit of his own, with sly parodies of Kenny G and the like. He contributes a subtle and important manipulation of mood, without which the performances would lack a crucial dimension.

But with these cute, undeniably entertaining playlets, Kaufman and Burwell have opened a truly intriguing rabbit hole they take great pains to avoid. To go there would be to use the medium for an exploration of the unknown. It would be to ask questions that matter, rather than to obsessively answer those that don't.

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'Theater of the New Ear'

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Westwood

When: 8 p.m. today

Ends: Today

Price: $38 to $60

Contact: (310) 825-2101

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes