THEATER REVIEW : ‘Money’ Covers Some Familiar Territory

Noel Coward commented on how potent cheap music can be. Julie Jensen comments on how seductive cheap TV can be, in “White Money,” at the Powerhouse Theatre.

Jensen is no Coward. For example, the repeated belches of a trucker (Granville Ames, displaying remarkable timing) are among the comic highlights of “White Money.”

The play follows the trucker’s young bride (Jeannine Renshaw) from her trailer park in deepest Nevada to a truck stop, elsewhere in Nevada, and finally to a mysterious roadside motel in Oklahoma. Along the way, she tries to free herself from the grip of moronic or vaguely sinister vidiots, only to end up succumbing to the dream of being on TV herself.

Jensen’s point is stale, and the cartoonish characterizations are as broad as a big-screen TV. But as a director, Jensen has found a few funny moments deep within her story.

Besides Ames, the sketch artists include Wendy Kamenoff as a tough-talking cowgirl, Carrie Collier as a memorably wrinkled mom whose devotion to a TV evangelist knows no bounds and Rick Williams as a murkily defined “Guy.”

In Act Two, add Maria Pavone as a motel desk clerk who appears to have wandered in from Bombay and Jerome Smith and Shanti Khan as a married pair of flamboyant wrestlers. The cumulative impressions of this menagerie begin to resemble something out of a David Lynch movie.

The ending makes no sense, but this is the kind of a play in which sensibility is regarded more highly than sense.

* “White Money,” Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends March 14. $12. (310) 392-6529. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.