O.C. THEATER / ROBERT KOEHLER : ‘Ten Little Indians’ Gets Tweaked : The ending is different, and although the cast is uneven, everyone has fun in Garden Grove Community Theatre production.

GARDEN GROVE —  Ah, there’s nothing quite like that ever-unpredictable, topsy-turvy, will-’o-the-wisp phenomenon known as Garden Grove theater.

The “serious” theater in town, GroveShakespeare, does a light Noel Coward (“Private Lives”) that only a few people liked, runs out of cash and time, and dies as it is preparing “King Lear.”

The “not-so-serious” theater in town, the Garden Grove Community Theatre, does a chestnut (“Ten Little Indians”) in a subversive manner, and is filling the house.

Don’t think a revolution is going on, though. The kind of interesting surprises that GroveShakespeare would pull off--not in the boardroom but on stage, such as Ron Campbell’s remarkable “Monsieur Shaherazad”--are sorely missed. And director Dan Blackley’s staging of “Ten Little Indians” is still community theater.

It is very good community theater, though, and it nudges Agatha Christie’s still-ghoulish variation on the Jacobean revenge play into a much darker area than even she imagined.

To wit, it changes the ending; that is (without revealing anything more), it deletes the whodunit’s small dollop of romance. Squashes it, in fact, like one of the “Indians” that the invisible but audible mystery host, a Mr. Owen, targets in his isolated island house off England’s Devon coast.

The locale is one of the world’s hot spots for shipwrecks, and Owen’s motley guests soon feel lost on the shoals of suspicion, not sure why they are here, less sure what their host intends. When they least expect it, their master’s voice comes over the living room stereo (Pat O’Neal’s not very intimidating voice) accusing them all of murder.

The English dialects range from Norwich to Cornwall to Tennessee--sometimes within the same character. The setup scenes plod where they should amuse, and the cast is uneven in the best community theater tradition.

But in that same tradition, everyone also is having a lot of very bloody fun with the material, tweaking the Grand Guignol aspects and injecting some campiness into this murder-by-numbers. Susan E. Taylor’s Mrs. Rogers sets a funny tone and it gets picked up relay-style by amusing Michael Havnaer as her caretaker husband, frosty Mary O’Brien as puritanical Emily Brent, and (despite major dialect problems) Michael Ross doing an inscrutable number as Judge Wargrave.

The straight roles are fairly well anchored by Darren Boyett as the debonair Lombard and Holly Sneed as Owen’s secretary, though Sneed’s approach as an innocent messes up Christie’s game for the audience, which is to suspect everyone.

In the Garden Grove’s tiny, spare confines, the uncredited set combines with Lee Schulman’s crucial lights to become a kind of homey prison--not as easy as it may sound. Nothing about this play is, really. But it’s good to see such a venerable mystery treated with a touch of disrespect.

* “Ten Little Indians,” Garden Grove Community Theatre, 12001 St. Mark St., Garden Grove. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Saturday. $7-$8. (714) 897-5122. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes. Michael Havnaer Rogers

Susan E. Taylor; Mrs. Rogers

Christopher Knutson: Fred Narracott

Holly Sneed: Vera Claythorne

Darren Boyett: Philip Lombard

Kelly Lane Wanberg: Anthony Marston

Mitchell Nunn: William Blore

Ray Akin: General Mackenzie

Mary O’Brien: Emily Brent

Michael Ross: Sir Lawrence Wargrave

Larry Swerdlow: Dr. Armstrong

Pat O’Neal: The Voice

A Garden Grove Community Theatre production. Written by Agatha Christie. Directed by Dan Blackley. Lights: Lee Schulman. Production stage manager: Patricia Toubail.