STAGE REVIEW : SOBERING TALE OF INCEST UNFOLDS IN ‘LANDSCAPE’

Wild dogs, frozen landscapes, dirty little secrets, a burned-out house. The stuff of soap opera?

Usually. While Timothy Mason’s “In a Northern Landscape� at the Cast-at-the-Circle doesn’t entirely avoid its melodramatic edge, the play is impressive--elliptical and poetic, haunted if not haunting.

There are, in fact, so many good things about this Thinair Productions’ “Landscape� that one’s immediate inclination is to forgive what doesn’t quite work in it.

What doesn’t--and we might as well get it out of the way at once--is a moralism that asks for understanding, but offers no fresh insights on the play’s delicate central issue: incest and its catastrophic consequences in a small Minnesota farm community in the 1920s.

There also is a slight tendency to over-brood; a displaced colloquialism here and there; an occasional slip by the excellent Bobbi Holtzman (the mother) into a tone so conversational that it spoils her otherwise soberingly unsentimental performance.

Insistence on keeping things colloquial, in fact, is a serious and correct attempt by director Judy Welden to guard against the easy pitfall of a Gothic approach for a play in which the deck is so heavily stacked from the start.

By setting his case in the genial and loving household of a rural professor of philosophy (Donald Hotton), his pragmatic wife (Holtzman) and their engaging teen-age children (Kathy Graber and Leo Geter), Mason throws us the right kind of curve.

He makes his characters affectionate and appealing, ordinary and unusual at the same time. In almost direct contradiction, he also spins his web against a backdrop of insulated lives spent on vast, puritanical spaces where the vague but constant threat of a marauding pack of wild dogs parallels a pervasive suggestion of doom.

It’s an admirable trick that makes this play, despite the perilous potential of its subject, sensitive and palatable. Welden wins the rest of the battle by the directness of her approach and by casting the characters uncommonly well.

Geter and Graber are able, attractive, believable and impossible to dislike. Holtzman is an inviting blend of the intelligent and pragmatic. And while the wiry, white-haired Hotton is a bit weak vocally, a strong case can be made for his unconventional professorial presence and dry wit, as out of step and context in this community as it sometimes appears in this play.

There are also Geter’s friends, a pack of playful young Minnesota Scandinavians just discovering their sexuality, who, when confronted by Geter’s and Graber’s “secret,� are so unable to deal with it that they assault them with rending violence.

For Geter there is a horrific end, for Graber the relentless torture of ongoing psychological anguish. For the parents, a numbing helplessness after the moral and physical holocaust.

Terry Welden’s charred shell of a house, Lori Balian’s costumes and Megan McCormick’s murky lights all enhance the production. Outstanding among the circle of friends is Lee Biolos, who also co-produced with Judy Welden.

Performances at 800 N. El Centro Ave. in Hollywood run Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., until Feb. 17 (462-0265).