STAGE REVIEW : Griffin Makes a Persuasive Case at the Tiffany

Someone early on must have told Annie Griffin to take her time. Really take her time. She’s heeded the admonition. There is nothing Griffin does better than pace herself. Well, almost nothing. It is the heart and soul of her “Almost Persuaded,” now at the Tiffany.

Well, almost.

The sinew might be a more descriptive way of putting it. Griffin has plenty of guts and plenty of heart, which is reflected in the country & Western music with which she punctuates her startling one-woman show. She also has plenty of talent. And humor. Sly, devilish, underhanded humor. What she doesn’t have much of is a script. Though she had her audience Wednesday almost persuaded that one would eventually emerge.

That is her stock in trade--almost: this expectation of something more . . . solidified. In a relatively short program, Griffin teases us with this carrot. Everything she does seems headed toward some apotheosis. It never comes.

A lot of other stuff does. Games (“Name the 50 states in one breath”). Reflections. Scenes structured as reminiscences that probably aren’t. Very sly. Crafty. Designed to hit you later.

Even Griffin’s entrance is a proclamation. She appears upstage right in tight-fitting fringed white satin and stays there, perusing the space’s occupants: a row of chairs and a table topped with one radio/tape deck, three bottles of beer, two vases of flowers and lots of record albums. Awkwardly, she eases into one of the chairs, demurely avoiding our glances. Moments pass. Griffin reaches into her purse, stands and, with her lipstick, writes on the wall: I WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND ME.

And we’re off. The rest of the evening is spent doing just that, except that there is more than one persona here to keep track of, let alone understand. This is not an autobiography. It’s an amalgam of types, snatches from other people’s lives, and perhaps from her own, with the music of Tammy Wynette, Kitty Wells and others making points and adding flavor.

Tall, attractive and sleek, with a Pepsodent smile, Griffin has nerves of steel. She loves to “feel” her audience, test it, measure and weigh it--and scramble its radar.

Her specialty when she makes a move is to make it a jump cut. She careens from the personal to the abstract, the funny to the serious, the young woman at the bar who is “Almost Persuaded” to go home with the tall, handsome stranger--to the divorced farm wife, mother of three, trying just to hold on.

You admire the work, you laugh at the humor, you warm to the personality, you endure the occasional barren patch, and you go home wondering how subliminal a message can get before it becomes a nonmessage. Hers is indirectness at its most rarefied. It is theater as semaphore, worth the deciphering.

The bone-dryness of Griffin’s wit, the subtlety of her feminism and the starchy defiance with which both are imparted make her not for all markets.

Some of her audiences won’t want to reach that hard for “meaning.” Most will settle for the considerable if often mildly puzzling pleasures of the moment. But it’s nice to go home for a change savoring a show’s aftermath as much as its math. And there you have it: In its sophisticated, insidious way “Almost Persuaded” makes its own persuasive case.

Performances at 8532 Sunset Blvd. run Tuesdays through Sundays, 8:30 p.m., until July 30. Tickets: $ 16-$18.50; (213) 652-6165.