‘Winter Project’ a Promising Debut

Alienation is the opiate of the existential class, and there’s angst aplenty in the post-apocalyptic plays that make up “The Winter Project,” a promising debut by the Open Window Theatre Group.

Striking visual composition by Billy Worley and Leif Tilden uses the cavernous Evidence Room to great advantage--evoking a barren desert tableau with twilit mountains silhouetted in the distance.

It’s a setting well-suited to both pieces, Deanne Stillman’s contemporary comedy “You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago” and Spanish absurdist Fernando Arrabal’s “Fando & Lis.”

Stillman’s short satire is a wry depiction of a nuclear family that has outlived its own context. Camping in a Ford Taurus, they subsist on toast and the futile hope that Dad (Perry J. King) can land a job. Their remaining social links are intermittent telephone opinion polls. Under Mark Austin’s direction, Erin Matthews cuts an amusing figure as a kind of Donna Reed trapped in survivalist hell.

The more serious “Fando & Lis” may have been written in 1969, but its timeless, uncompromising reflections on power dynamics weather the transition to futuristic devastation without a hitch. Overtones of Beckett unmistakably shade Arrabal’s tale of a slovenly ruffian (Austin) who drags around his paralyzed lover (Heather Herion) in a cart. Their relationship seesaws edgily between groveling dependency and shocking brutality as they head for the unreachable land of Tar. Their chance encounter with a trio of travelers (Tilden, who also directed; Worley; and Jake Eberle) only underscores the inescapable selfishness and estrangement in Arrabal’s universe.

Considerable whimsy in Tilden’s staging pierces the gloom--especially his loony choreography re-creating the end of the world, and the ironic vision of resurrection at the play’s close. Still, like many absurdist works, “Fando & Lis” tends to mistake agitation for feeling, relegating its impact to the cerebral plane.

* “The Winter Project,” Evidence Room, 3542 Hayden Ave., Culver City. Thursdays, Fridays, Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 25. $15. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.