Balancing acts Silly and serious at 2nd Story BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The second round of short plays at 2nd Story Theatre is a nicely balanced bunch. The five Short Attention Span Theatre offerings range from silly/surreal to serious, assuring that whether you come to laugh or cry, you won’t be disappointed.

The closing play and the longest, Life Under Water, by Richard Greenberg, is the drama that balances the pre-intermission frivolity. It does so with considerable weight and impact, though the playwright and assembled talent make sure the lesson underway is subliminal.

This one-act has all of the completeness and closure of a full-length play. In little more than a half-hour, we get to know the defining dimensions of not only five characters, but also a milieu. Ennui in the Hamptons has been written about for the stage and in more New Yorker short stories than you can shake a bottle of Prozac at, but rarely more economically. Kip (Will Jamieson) could settle for being just another spoiled teenager renting his affection for his wealthy parents’ support, but he wants more. His mother Jinx (Catherine Boisseau) is well-meaning enough, but not morally equipped to be a role model. Kip is an idealist, seeking "to be a responsible person." Divorcee mom settles for married Hank (Walter Cotter), whose fellow Exeter alums are so devoid of class that several are making ends meet as gigolos.

When Kip runs away from his mother’s summer home, he wanders a few miles down the beach. He meets a couple of young women his age who represent two extremes. Amy Joy (Erin Malcolm) is not only joyless, she’s soulless. Idly, she torments a five-year-old girl cousin in her charge into terror of sea monsters, and she wants to marry someone boring to minimize her effort. Amy Beth (Laura Sorenson) was recently in a mental hospital — not out of something as trite as a suicide attempt, just from being too tired to cope.

When Kip falls for the second, supposedly less attractive Amy because the other one wants him and that would be "common," "too easy," we know we are in original territory. Life Under Water is perfectly cast, each actor physically and temperamentally spot-on as well as a top-notch performer. It stayed with me enough to wish, however complete the play was, that Greenberg had written a second act and that this ensemble would enthrall me with it as well.

The first half of the program consists of four playful romps. Mrs. Sorken, by Christopher Durang, ostensibly has Marilyn Murphy Meardon give the audience a pre-show lecture on the nature of drama as it relates to Dramamine. See, insofar as the Greeks devised theater to "evoke terror and pity" (we employ political press conferences, but that’s another story), drama comes in handy to apply to the resulting nausea. Meardon is so softly funny as she presses the heel of a hand to an eye at each mention of Mr. Sorken rather than scowling, that we can almost feel Mrs. Sorken’s headache.

Next is A Closer Look, by Arlene Hutton, a sort of behind-the-scenes reality glimpse at reality TV. Tish (Margarita) is a shock show interviewer who thinks she’s still a serious journalist since she would rather do segments on breast cancer than breast jobs. Entering in a cloud of hairspray, trailing two bickering hair and costume assistants, she’s fully capable of locking egos with the show’s associate producer Amanda (Pam Faulkner), threatening to get her fired if she doesn’t get her way. This slice-of-life didn’t work for me because, I think, I need to give a damn about damned people even if they’re paraded before me to laugh at.

Easier to accomplish is Teeth, by Tina Howe. Jim Sullivan and Joanne Fayan are, together and separately, hilarious as a dentist and his patient. She has a disturbing dream about teeth dribbling out of her mouth and he, once an almost music major, would much rather listen to Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations than tout floss. Their simultaneous soliloquies are a hoot, the actors outdoing themselves in spiraling hysteria. This one’s worth the evening.

Reprised from five years ago is David Ives’ Variations on the Death of Trotsky. We are invited in on a deathbed hallucination of the revolutionary (Tom Roberts), who is joined by his wife (Lynne Collinson) and the gardener (Seth Allen) who killed him. Protruding from his head is the mountaineering pickaxe of his demise, as he and his wife do Ralph and Alice Kramden variations ("Mrs. Trotsky — you’re the greatest!") on domestic spatting. It’s process rather than payoff, but Ives does manage to place a sweet little cherry on top.

Cute, curt, cute, cute, complete. I don’t know about you, but for me that makes for a pretty good evening.