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Producing new plays is a gamble that most theater companies shy away from. At best, established theaters stage only the occasional world premiere. 

Their reasoning is that the economics of theater are so severe, it’s hard to give up the number of tickets that will be sold just by the name recognition alone that goes with producing a play or a playwright whom people have already heard of. 

Enter Berkeley’s Impact Theatre, which does things a little differently. Since 1996, Impact has been producing new plays by emerging playwrights for an 18 to 35 year-old audience, and keeping the ticket costs low. 

In five seasons, the Berkeley company has produced 10 full-length world premieres – nine by local playwrights – as well as dozens of world premiere 10-minute plays in its “Impact Briefs” series. 

Impact’s current show – running weekends at the Eighth Street Studio – is Joe Foust and Richard Ragsdale’s “Action Movie: the Play.” This is a rare Impact show that actually has been produced before, premiering in 1999 at the Defiant Theatre in Chicago. 

The play is a wild and energetic stage spoof of action movie stories, characters and cliché situations, many of its bits identifiable from specific Hollywood films. 

In “Action Movie,” an evil, murderous Viet Nam vet named Kreegar (Alex Pearlstein) evolves into a corporate tycoon who wants to take over and destroy the world. To combat Kreegar, an odd collection of characters from action movies band together and make an assault on his compound to stop this heinous scheme. 

This is a rough and wild staging, broadly performed. Director Christopher Morrison, who has a background in martial arts, has brought a lot of fighting to the show. 

These fighting scenes at their best are some of the highlights of the production, although Morrison’s traditional directing of the actors’ performances is not strong. 

The script of “Action Movie” has something to offend everyone. It is mean and sadistic – but supposedly in a funny way, I guess. 

For example, on two occasions a baby is beaten up. Later, a pregnant woman injects speed into her stomach. Elsewhere, a security guard suffocates when someone sits on her face. 

A girl scout selling cookies is sexually molested. There’s a friendly pedophilia joke. There are lots of guns in the play. 

Despite the movie’s desire to be edgy, most of the scenes and gags, recycled as parodies from other Hollywood sources, seem familiar. Shooting someone, for example, and then saying, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina,” just isn’t that funny. 

For all of its wild energy and effort, the production is bland, because there is so little art and performance skill in the actors’ relentless onslaught of noise and running around. 

Successful action sequences in movies depend on special effects, careful cinematographic choices, and thoughtful acting, directing and editing. Little of that translates to the current production. 

For a script like “Action Movie” to work, for example, it needs sophisticated comedic performances from the actors, to put real human life into the familiar and clichéd lines. 

But in director Morrison’s production, the acting is crude, consisting in large part of yelling and running, and making funny voices and twisted facial expressions. A little bit of that goes a long way. Before long, the show loses any texture, variation, or pacing and becomes one endless session of shouting and screaming. 

Although the characters in the play are different types (evil corporate boss, cop, cyborg, homeboy, army vet, security guard), the performances are all so broad and similar that most of the characters feel the same. Everyone speaks the same in-your-face hot dog language. 

Some of the performers have chops, but no one displays them very well in this production. As violent Cyborg Woman, Sarina Hart has the strongest moments of real acting. 

Sound guy Steve Klems, posted at his computer and sound station, deserves a round of applause. He makes a big contribution to the show with many bam-pow-biff sound effect – gunshots of various types, airplane noises, necks cracking, and a variety of music. 

I personally enjoy the juvenile, offensive humor that’s emerged in our culture over the last 30 years. But “Action Movie” just isn’t that funny. 

This production ends up feeling like a kids’ game of guns and kung fu – fun for the participants, obviously, but not very entertaining for a viewer. 

Dail Planet theater reviewer John Angell Grant can be e-mailed at jagplays@yahoo.com.