Plenty of Laughs, but No Discipline

Listen closely to something uttered by romantic and slightly desperate Russian dairy farmer Ilia Pushkin near the beginning of David Laird Scott and Ilia Volok’s comedy, “The Russians Are Here!!” at American Renegade Theatre, and you’ll hear the clue to all that follows.

We won’t reveal the clue, but what follows is hardly a mystery--more a silly, madcap adventure of Slavic innocence lost in an American wonderland.

Scott and Volok play all the roles (specifically, Volok plays Ilia; Scott plays the rest of what seems like several dozen characters), and there’s a sense in their play of boundless energy, bubbling joy and almost no instinct for when something stops being funny. “The Russians Are Here!!” is a big, broad attempt at spoofing America and Russia heading into the new century without a compass or a captain at the helm.

Ilia should be milking his cows, but instead he’s swept away by the idea of writing to an American pen pal, making up addresses and hoping his missives get somewhere.

His 72nd attempt falls into the hands of Larry, a long-haired L.A. dude who’s totally stoked when Ilia drums up enough rubles to fund a “vacation” to the land of Hollywood.

If Ilia didn’t have bad luck, though, he’d have no luck at all, so he misses Larry at LAX and quickly ends up on skid row.

This summary of the play’s early moments leaves out much, though.

It’s a dangerous sign that, this early on, the play’s humor is so beyond itself, where a gag just won’t stop until it dies. Several scenes bear the influence of Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks’ “2,000-Year-Old Man” sketches, but they inevitably peter out, or just seem ridiculous.

Ilia, for instance, is so desperate for work that he takes a job at a cemetery but is fired after one difficult customer. Why? No reason, it seems, other than to move him on to another nutty adventure.

From a comic standpoint, “The Russians Are Here!!” plays a dangerous game, because all of Ilia’s crazy American encounters--climaxing with his liberating a beloved gorilla from the zoo where he most wants to work--feel so arbitrary.

That’s actually intentional, but we come to realize this long after the play has lost much of its satirical juice.

So, given the anything-goes nature of the story, Ilia ends up U.S. president (yes, he’s eligible, for reasons too complicated to explain here) after becoming a global tycoon hawking potato juice.

If any of this plays on stage funnier than it sounds, it’s because of the sheer verve that Volok and Scott bring to their sometimes astonishing performances.

And if ever there were a play typifying L.A. theater’s claim to having many more great actors than playwrights, this is the one.

When Scott switches wigs faster than you can say “babushka,” and his dialect along with it, he brings back the pleasures of the best comedy skits on “The Carol Burnett Show.”

Yet it’s when this daredevil approach to acting is applied to the writing that the play is sent off the rails.

Significantly, no director is credited. Although the pacing is razor-sharp on the Renegade’s expansive main stage, no single editor was around to corral the writing-acting duo when they needed it the most.

Mary Knippling’s set visually stitches together a Russian and American flag, but it’s more ugly than clever, and a running video monitor with taped inserts adds length but hardly any laughs to an already long show.

BE THERE

“The Russians Are Here!!,” American Renegade Theatre, 11136 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends March 18. $10-$15. (818) 763-4430. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.