THEATER REVIEWS : ‘One-Act’ Fest Full of Provocative Riches

Theatre 40’s “6th Annual One-Act Festival” is a ho-hum title for one of the richest and most satisfying shows in town. Not to mention one of the most provocative.

How many theaters, after all, would dare to stage a sober, sentimental playlet about an old man’s grief for his son, who presumably died of AIDS, and then follow it with an insouciant one-act about two parents performing at-home brain surgery--on their 6-year-old daughter?

In another anthology, the effect might have seemed jarring. Yet producer-director Andre Barron has picked four intriguing scripts and matched them with extraordinarily able directors and casts, plus impressive sets by Dave Carleen. The result is like seeing a variety of fine short stories brought to exhilarating life.

Perhaps the best--and certainly the funniest--is “Doing Something for Sally,” a delightful slice of the absurd from Canadian playwright Chris Ralph. Plucky housewife Marie (Gita Donovan) and her ex-jock husband Ted (Chip Heller) team up to remove a tumor from their daughter’s brain, using kitchen utensils as operating tools.

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Ralph’s play is partly an open-faced satire on the health-care crisis. Arguing that no one can afford health insurance anymore, Marie says matter-of-factly: “Pretty soon you’ll see everybody operating on each other at home.”

Yet like Christopher Durang, Ralph uses lunacy to lambaste a target closer to home. Marie and Ted’s operation is a metaphor for the subtle brainwashing all parents employ in the name of “doing something” for their children. Director Stephen Tobolowsky--a well-known character actor--keeps the cast hilariously deadpan, with an especially fine turn from Heller, who summarizes his character’s fumbling, lunkhead charm in one memorable non sequitur: “Geez, I miss football!”

Speaking of fine turns, Rhonda Lord sinks her teeth into a role of delicious grandeur in Joe Pintauro’s “Seymour in the Very Heart of Winter,” a kind of abbreviated “Sunset Boulevard.” Lord’s Vivienne is an aging actress, once famous but now down on her luck, who is wiling away her autumn years on the arm of a young, simple-minded chauffeur, Joe (Demetrio James).

Over Christmas Eve dinner at a swank French restaurant, Vivienne escapes unpleasant reality by mooning over her bisexual ex-husband and indulging rich fantasies that would make Norma Desmond green with envy. Bruce Gray directed with taste and restraint.

Catherine Butterfield’s “John’s Hand,” directed by Michael Haney, is a bittersweet, beautifully written encounter among three very different relatives: John (Bill Dunlevy), a self-satisfied, taciturn scientist; Cynthia (Michelle Manning), his no-nonsense wife, and Terry (Lisa Goodman), John’s obsessive, self-doubting sister.

“Rosen’s Son,” a somewhat weaker effort by Pintauro, finds aged Orthodox Jew Rosen (Thom Keane-Koutsoukos) paying a fateful visit to his dead son’s gay lover (James Bartz). Basically a guilt trip, in every sense of the term, the play still manages to move, thanks to sensitive direction from Barron.

* “The 6th Annual One Act Festival,” Theatre 40, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 5. $10. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.